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oersast 





THE UNIVERSITY 
OF ILLINOIS 
LIBRARY 


From the library of 
Marian E. Sparks °95 
Purchased, 1929 


Sis 
H 88 tr 


Cop.2. 


REMOTE STORAGE 


Return this book on or before the 
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MOUNTAIN VERITIES 


BY THE SAME AUTHOR 


THE HOMESTEAD 

THE SWORD OF THE SPIRIT 
THE EDGE OF THE WOODS 
GRAIL FIRE 


E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY 





MOUNTAIN VERITIES 


BY 
ZEPHINE HUMPHREY 


AvTHOR OF ‘‘ THE HoMESTEAD,” ETc. 





NEW YORK 
E. P. DUTTON AND COMPANY 
681 FirtH AVENUE 


Copyright, 1923 
By E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY 


All Rights Reserved 





Printed in the United States of America 





TO WHOM 
SHOULD I DEDICATE THIS BOOK 
BUT TO 


| Christopher 








I am indebted to Scribner’s Magazine and 
Country Life in America for their courtesy in 
permitting me to republish the substance of six of 
the following chapters. 











MOUNTAIN VERITIES 


————$———_ 


I 


what we called ‘ta country home.” Now 
we have only a home. The difference is 
immense. 

The change came about through the various in- 
fluences which have been so potent with us all since 
the Great War, challenging and disrupting our 
conceptions of the world we live in, revolutionizing 
our points of view, turning many of us right-about 
face and some of us upside down. Every reader 
knows what I mean. There is not a life anywhere 
that has escaped the whirlwind that sprang from 
the vast sowing of wind. We have only to look 
back at what we can remember of ourselves eight 
years ago and then look at what we can focus of 
our present selves to marvel at the transformation. 
“If this be I, as I think it be.” But even the little 


Ne very long ago Christopher and I had 


2 Mountain Verities 


dogs are different nowadays, so there is nobody to 
recognize us. 

Not that that matters. The great point is to 
find out for ourselves what we are, what we want, 
and whither we are bound. ‘Mankind has struck 
its tents and is on the march.”’ Evidently. But be- 
side what caravan route do we personally intend 
next to pitch the tent which we have removed? 

It was perhaps from some deep-lying need for 
re-self-possession, self-orientation, that Christo- 
pher and I came back to Vermont. We had both 
been to France, had both suffered from disappoint- 
ment and disillusion, were both bewildered and 
tired and felt several hundred years older. But 
more than anything else I think it was from a 
passionate desire for reality. 

The war had never seemed real. It was a com- 
pletely usurping interest, so that, while it lasted, 
nobody could think of anything else; but it was a 
nightmare, a hideous fraud. In the name of all 
humanity we had resented it. ‘The ensuing years 
had been even worse. What a heart-breaking re- 
action into smallness and selfishness, greed and 
sordid ambition! ‘This was not the world, our 
world, as we had known and loved it; this was a 
mad hoax. Where was the world then? It could 
not have been annihilated, for it was immortal; it 


Mountain Verities 3 


must be in hiding somewhere, waiting until the 
hurricane and earthquake were overpast. God had 
tucked it away and put His hand over it. 

Therefore it was from no wish to escape life 
that we returned to our valley, but rather from a 
consuming wish to rediscover life as it really is. If 
we were to go on trying to play our part in our 
day and generation we must base our efforts on 
truth. 

We were fortunate in having an old house to re- 
turn to. Old houses have enough of humanity 
about them to seem sympathetic and responsive, 
but they are also sufficiently detached to abide im- 
mutably by standards of their own. 

Our old house stands a mile and a half from a 
Vermont village, on the edge of a meadow across 
which it looks to a range of broken and moulded 
hills. Big maples shade it, behind it an apple 
orchard runs up a grassy slope, beside it stands an 
old red barn transformed by Christopher into a 
studio. It is serene and wise, it has lived many 
years, and wars and rumors of wars are not un- 
familiar to it. In fact, tradition insists that Ethan 
Allen slept here on his way to the Battle of Ben- 
nington. But strife is the last thing it sugests or 
seems to remember as it broods beneath its maples 
in the midst of its flower gardens and watches the 


4 Mountain Verities 


lights and shadows change on the quiet hills. 
Surely, when it has sheltered life for so many 
decades and has run the gamut of human exper- 
lence, it can be trusted to know what matters and 
what does not, what is worth remembering and 
what must be let slip. In the last analysis all 
battles are confessions of failure, whereas dear, 
daily human life is a constantly repeated success. 
That is the way I interpreted the first silent effect 
the house had on me as I stood and looked at it the 
day of our return. 

I remember that the spring afternoon was draw- 
ing towards its close and that luminous shadows 
were folded into the hollows of the hills. The light 
was soft and caressing, dwelling with tenderness 
on the young green of the awakening forests. 
Bluebirds and song sparrows and meadow larks 
sang in the meadow. Ah! the valley was lovely— 
so dear and familiar, yet unfamiliar too, as if I 
were, in some strange way, seeing it both for the 
thousandth and the first time. It was certainly 
graver than I used to think it, stronger, more pur- 
poseful. Had the war saddened it after all? No, 
it was not sad, it was only deep. I let myself go 
into its immensity and found no metes nor bounds. 

Also I remember that Christopher went the 
rounds of the orchard and garden with me and 


. SS a 


Mountain Verities 5 


then disappeared into his studio. After sitting 
awhile on the front steps alone, I got up and went 
in search of him. 

“Christopher,” I said, slipping my arm through 
his as he stood looking at some old canvases with 
a complex expression of dissatisfaction and interest 
—‘‘that’s a nice canvas, isn’t it? No? Well, of 
course you can do better now.—Christopher, do 
you feel as I do, that we’ve been born again into a 
new world which is the same old dear one, and that 
we're very little children with everything to 
learn?” 

Christopher nodded, leaning forward to scratch 
a corner of one of his canvases with his finger nail. 

“Tt’s a good feeling,” I pondered, “‘but it’s very 
sobering. It makes me glad too. Oh, Christo- 
pher!”’ 

Christopher turned and gave me the glance 
which members of our generation will always know 
how to give one another, the glance which means 
that, whether or not we have yet managed to wash 
our robes white (and we certainly have not!), we 
have at least come out of great tribulation to- 
gether. 

‘Now for real living!” he said. 


IT 


out understanding in what way or to what 

extent. In fact, the function of change is 
precisely to set one free of an undiscovered country, 
the roads and contours of which one has to learn 
by experiment. And while one is learning, feeling 
one’s way, one inevitably tries to follow old fa- 
miliar paths. 

Take the matter of our new cook. 

We had always had cooks. The habit was so 
settled upon me, apparently so ingrained in my 
nature, that I could almost as easily have thought 
of trying to keep house without fire and water as 
without a Bridget to manipulate these articles. We 
had generally had very satisfactory Bridgets too, 
so that there was no particular reason based on 
experience why I should dread a new relationship. 
Yet I did dread it, obscurely, profoundly. My 
heart and I were a balky horse and an enthusias- 
tic driver, the one chirruping loudly, the other 
planting his four feet firmly and refusing to budge. 

Our neighbors understand our domestic habits 

6 


(ya can realize that one has changed with- 


Mountain Verities 7 


as well as we do ourselves, and we had not been 
home two days before somebody came to return 
the oil can and the wheelbarrow (‘Thanks very 
much. I knew you wouldn’t mind me using them 
while you were away.’’) and incidentally to re- 
mark, “If you ain’t got a hired girl yet, I know of 
just the one for you.” The effect of these words 
on me was so disconcerting that I seriously thought 
my wits must be addled. Instinctively I opened my 
lips to say, ‘“Good!”’ but an inner sinking prevented 
me and, to my stupefaction, I found myself hedg- 
ing and hesitating, making all sorts of excuses to 
avoid interviewing the proffered damsel. I had 
never felt this way before in my life. 

“Thank you; you're very kind,” I stammered. 
“IT daresay she’s just what I want.. But—but— 
Pll have to think about it a little. I-—TI'll let you 
know.” 

‘But she’s at my house now,” the neighbor went 
on with a puzzled frown. ‘She came over on 
purpose an’ was plannin’ to see you this morning.” 

‘“‘I—I’m not sure I’m going to be home,” | hur- 
riedly temporized. “‘My husband was talking of 
going to Manchester.” ‘This fortunately was true. 
“At any rate, you see, I don’t know “ 

I broke off. What was it I did not know? I 


could not finish my sentence. 





8 Mountain Verities 


I think my neighbor shared my horrid suspicion 
that I might be a little mad. He looked at me 
gravely. 

“You're here now,” he persisted, ‘and it 
wouldn’t take very long. You'd come to terms in 
no time.” 

That was just it. I was sure we should. With 
no reason on earth for refusing to engage her, | 
knew I had only to be confronted with a likely cook 
to come to terms with her. And the inner horse I 
was trying to drive stamped all his feet in absolute 
refusal. 

I shook my head. 

‘Tm sorry,” I said speaking as disarmingly as 
possible, “‘but you'll have to tell her to wait. 
Really, [ don’t know.” 

The exact nature of my inhibiting nescience was 
no more clearly defined than before, but this time 
I did not leave my sentence in the air. I closed 
it with a finality which, I hoped, gave it a certain 
dignity. Then, as my neighbor muttered, ‘‘Mebbe 
she won’t wait,’’ (whereat my inner horse discon- 
certed me more than ever by prancing with de- 
light) I turned away to hunt up Christopher. 
‘Now, whether or not you want to, you'll have to 
take me to Manchester,”’ I stated. 


Mountain Verities 9 


On the way, I explained the situation and began 
trying to come to some understanding of it. 

“Why,” smiled Christopher matter-of-factly, “‘it 
looks to me as if you wanted to do the cooking 
yourself.” 

“But I can’t, Christopher.”” I was shocked. “I 
mean I can’t want to. I never have. I’ve always 
hated it.” 

“What was that you were saying yesterday 
about being born again?” asked Christopher. 

It was a significant question, as Christopher’s 
questions are apt to be, and it kept me silent a mile 
or two, pondering possibilities which I found very 
exciting. But were they possibilities? The 
leopard cannot change his spots, and how can a 
mature woman change the bias of many years and 
come to love that which she has always found in- 
tensely wearisome? I must be under some spell. 

When we got home I went out in the kitchen and 
sat down in a chair by the table and fell into a pro- 
found revery. The room was not very familiar to 
me. Our various Bridgets had more or less 
frankly managed to convey the impression that 
they considered the kitchen their realm and that 
my presence in it was not strictly desirable. I had 
agreed with them. The library was my depart- 
ment. 


10 Mountain Verities 


Now, however, as I sat musing and waiting for 
the mystery in my own breast to begin to clear, I 
suddenly found that the kitchen was an attractive 
room. Too big for modern ideas of convenience, 
perhaps, but all the more restful for that, it runs 
across the rear width of the house, looking at one 
end into the flower garden and at the other, 
through the sunny pantry window, over to the 
studio and up at West Mountain. Its wide door 
opens into the apple orchard. As it is too big, so I 
daresay its arrangement of table and sink and stove ~ 
is not scientific. But are convenience and efficiency 
the first and only things to be desired of kitchens ? 
Is not something else more important, something 
that, for lack of a more definite term, we call per- 
sonality? It was the personality of the old house 
that had drawn me to it years before. It was the 
personality of the library that made me love it so. 
And now, as I sat and waited on the kitchen’s reve- 
lation, I began to perceive that it too had a soul 
and that it was speaking to me with a winning 
accent that went straight to my puzzled heart. 

‘Of course you don’t want another cook,” it said 
gently. ‘You want to come and dwell with me 
and let me teach you lessons of quietness and 
reality; you want to do for yourself and your hus- 
band those things that are fundamentally neces- 


Mountain Verities II 


sary, that no human lot can avoid; you want to be 
free and independent and self-sufficient. Come 
then. Stop puzzling over old prejudices; they are 
outlived and cast aside. Come and begin again; 
live a new life in the new age.” 

I was thrilled and alertly interested, and the first 
stirrings of intelligent conviction were felt in me. 
Again, as so often before in my life, I found myself 
proving the ready ability of human environment 
(which is only another name for the sentient uni- 
verse) to instruct and enlighten the heart which 
waits on it. 

Reality. Yes, it was that I wanted, that in 
search of which Christopher and I had come back 
to Vermont. Well, here I had it right under my 
hand, the realest of real things, reality which can- 
not fool one and seem more important than it is. 
Cook books are no scraps of paper, and the treaties 
and conferences between the pantry and the ice box 
are probably sincere. How could a new life de- 
voted to the principles of reality do better than 
begin its career in a kitchen? 

There was more to the matter too. Whether 
or not democracy was the true motive underlying 
the Great War, it was the prevailing slogan, the 
battle cry. And if those of us who believed its 
sincerity were deceived, the more reason why we 


12 Mountain Verities 


should wrest a measure of success from the vast 
failure and crown democracy in our private lives, 
letting the nations flout her if they must and will. 
The relation between master and man, mistress 
and maid may once have been democratic—in the 
old simpler days when all households made com- 
mon cause; but it is certainly not democratic now. 
There is even something abnormal and artificial 
about it which affords ample reason for the 
difficulties which beset it. How can two human 
beings live in harmonious sympathy if one always 
obeys while the other commands, if one has all the 
drudgery and the other all the privilege, if one sits 
alone in the kitchen and the other enjoys the 
warmth and fun of the family circle? Yet the very 
soul of family life is intimate privacy, and one 
would rather board and be done with it than have 
any stranger, even the best Bridget in the world, 
always by the fireside. A Bridgetless household 
seems the true unit of democracy. 

As I sat by the kitchen table, revolving these 
thoughts in my enlightened mind, I began to per- 
ceive that it was to something rather big and im- 
portant that life was summoning me. The world 
at large has repudiated the professions of the war, 
but all need not be lost if individuals and families 
here and there get soberly down to the business 


Mountain Verities Ps 


of achieving reality and democracy in their private 
lives. Let them do their own work, let them treat 
one another well, let them live simply and watch 
and pray, and there’s no telling— 

I drew a long breath. 

“Christopher,” I said, appearing in the studio 
doorway, ‘‘you were right: I do want to cook.” 

‘‘Now may heaven have mercy upon us!” re- 


plied Christopher feelingly. 


Ill 


WO extraneous influences combined to help 
me make the most and the best of my new 
experience. One was, now as always, 

Christopher (though he can hardly be called ex- 
traneous), the other was the much maligned H. C. 
Obs 

‘“‘We’re going to have simple meals, aren’t we?” 
Christopher asked later in the day of my refusal 
to engage a Hd cook. 

“Of course,” I answered promptly. 

‘Well, but,”—-some unconscious note in my 
voice or perhaps some wandering gleam in my eye 
anxiously interrogating the pantry shelves proved 
not satisfactory to him—‘what do you mean by 
simple? What, for instance, are you planning to 
have for supper tonight?” 

‘‘Now, Christopher!” I seized the chance he 
gave me to evade the question. ‘You know better 
than that. Don’t you remember how desperate I 
used to get because Bridget would come to me the 
minute dinner was over and say, ‘What shall we 


14 


Mountain Verities I5 


have for supper?’ It’s going to be one of the best 
things about doing my own work that I needn’t de- 
cide till the last minute.” 

‘True enough,” Christopher nodded. “But [ll 
bet a dollar to a doughnut that when I asked you 
the question just now you were turning over in your 
mind all the possibilities of the larder: eggs, fried 
potatoes, muffins, stewed rhubarb, cake.” 

I laughed. There is something uncanny about 
the way in which Christopher helps himself to my 
most secret thoughts. 

“Now I would respectfully suggest,’’ Christo- 
pher continued, “‘that instead of all that elaborate 
menu we have corn meal mush. [ lived on it when 
I was an art student, and it’s very good. I haven’t 
had any for years and years. No Bridget has ever 
been willing to make it for me or to let me come 
out in the kitchen and make it myself.” 

Christopher’s past ‘experience as a_ bachelor 
fending for himself left an apparently inex- 
haustible fund of wisdom in his mind. There seems 
no end to the number and variety of things he 
knows how to do. 

“You wouldn’t’”—his face kindled irresistibly— 
“I suppose you wouldn’t let me come out in the 
kitchen and help you get supper.” 


16 Mountain Verities 


“T will if you'll let me help you wash the Ford 
to-morrow,’ I answered gaily. 

“All right,” he assented; and forthwith we 
struck hands on a compact of mutual service which 
was to make our life together closer and more 
harmonious than ever—and that is saying much. 

Never was anything so delicious as that first 
supper of corn meal mush. Oddly enough, I could 
not remember having eaten the viand before, so it 
had all the flavor of novelty to me; and to Christo- 
pher it had the dearness of association and of re- 
newed intercourse with a long-lost and valued 
friend. It was symbolic too, and it struck the de- 
sired keynote of our new life more clearly and fully 
than anything else could have done. Simplicity and 
reality: twin terms that for us were to be 
synonymous. 

‘The way to enjoy food really,” I said, looking 
up from my golden saucerful floating in milk, “‘is 
to savor it with your mind as well as with your 
palate. And you can’t do that if it’s too compli- 
cated, you become confused.”’ 

‘And a little ashamed,” put in Christopher. 
‘Nobody wants to be a glutton, and if you think 
too much about rich and varied foods you lose your 
self-respect. Moreover, they don’t bear thinking 
about. Who can follow a beefsteak very far back 


Mountain Verities 17 


in its history? But corn meal mush’—he lifted 
a spoonful slowly—‘‘it’s all beautiful.” 

*Prairies,” I said. 

‘Sun and rain,” he replied. 

‘Dew and moonlight.” 

“August heats.” 

“Autumn mists.” 

“Huskings and rumbling mills.” 

‘“‘And—the middleman!” 

It was malicious in me to add the last item, but, 
after all, it was in the interests of truth. Christo- 
pher smiled ruefully. 

“I hope we're all beginning to get our eyes open 
to the middleman,” he answered. 

“What other things are wholly beautiful, 
Christopher?” I went on after a few minutes of 
thoughtful degustation. “Let’s see how many we 
can mention.” 

“Bread,” began Christopher, recommencing our 
pleasant litany. 

“Cheese,” I supplemented. 

“Eggs.” 

“Milk.” 

‘All kinds of fruits.” 

‘And vegetables.” 

e Rite.’ 

“Oh, well, all cereals.” 


18 Mountain Verities 


“Nuts.” 

‘Tea and coffee.” 

‘A pple-pie!l” 

I laughed—the word came out with such an 
earnest accent of sincerity. 

‘And chocolate cake,” I added. ‘“‘We mustn’t 
be too highbrow in our austerity. I do love choco- 
late cake.” 

“Well,” said Christopher, ‘we have, between 
us, mentioned as wholesome a diet as anyone could 
desire.” 

‘And delicious,” I went on, still under the spell 
of our antiphonal rhythm. 

‘And entirely blameless and beautiful,” Chris- 
topher concluded. 

‘With perhaps now and then some fish or a 
chicken,’ I added reasonably. 

‘‘T very much hope you're not going to take the 
attitude of the traditional housewife,”’ Christopher 
recommenced by and by, leaning back and lighting 
a cigarette, ‘‘that I must ‘keep to my own sphere,’ 
that there are certain things I’m ‘not supposed to 
know about.’ ” 

‘Traditional’ nowadays is only another term 
for ‘old-fashioned,’”’ I replied, “and nobody 
wants to be that any more. You're perfectly wel- 


Mountain Verities 19 


come to know all about the mysteries of the 
kitchen.” 

“It was ridiculous, wasn’t it?” Christopher 
mused, “to divide life up so accurately—one dis- 
tinct realm for the woman and another for the 
man. Just as if men and women were not created 
to share things.”’ 

“If they happen to want to,” I put in. 

“Yes,” replied Christopher with a nice glance. 
‘“That’s where we’re fortunate.” 

‘And since we want to,” I went on glowingly in 
a moment, ‘‘and since it suits our philosophy, we’re 
going to do it regardless of all the traditions that 
may still persist. You may sometimes (not 
always) wash the dishes for me, and I shall some- 
times (not always either) hoe the potatoes for 
you. Oh, Christopher!” I paused while the great 
realization broke over me again. ‘‘We’re home— 
we're safe—we're free!” 

“You went off on a new tack there,”’ said Chris- 
topher after another of those deep looks which I 
mentioned at the close of my first chapter, “but 
it’s easy to follow you. After all, I guess, in spite 
of our inability to fall in with current enthusiasms, 
we are as much the children of our age as anyone 
else. The spirit of freedom’s got hold of us too. 
Only instead of prompting us to march in proces- 


20 Mountain Verities 


sions or organize societies, it has driven us back- 
ward and inward, to strip off inessentials and get 
down to naked realities.” 

‘To that which we're sure of,” I added. 

Yes,’ Christopher mused; “yes. I’m tired of 
pretending I’m wise enough to know what the 
world ought to do, whether Bolshevism is good or 
bad, whether or not we ought to join the League of 
Nations. I’m not wise enough, I don’t know, and 
I shrewdly suspect that most people are in my 
condition. But, somehow, since the war began, 
we've all felt that we must make up our minds on 
every tremendous subject. It’s been a great strain, 
and the loss of humility hasn’t been good for us.” 

‘“That’s true,’ I admitted gravely. 

‘Of course these questions have got to be de- 
cided,” Christopher went on, “and I don’t want 
to run away and pass the buck. But there’s too 
much clamor, everybody is talking at once, some- 
body really must keep still awhile.” 

“And give God a chance?” I suggested. 

“Maybe.” Christopher nodded. ‘Maybe, if 
we all kept still, we’d hear an authentic Voice tell- 
ing us what to do next. Certainly we shall never 
hear it if we don’t grow humble again.” 

“Little children.” 

“Ves.” 


Mountain Verities 21 


By this time the spring dusk was filling the cor- 
ners of our old dining-room and the goodnight 
notes of robins were heard through the open win- 
dows. | | 

“Do you realize how long we've sat here?” I 
asked. 

Christopher grinned. 

“What if Bridget had been waiting to clear the 
table!” he said. ‘She'd have been in and out 
twenty times, fidgeting until we were routed.” 

“Oh! we are free, aren’t we?” I commented, 
with a long, luxurious sigh. “And now, since there 
are so few dishes, I’ll just rinse and stack them 
and wash them tomorrow morning.” 

‘“That’s the right spirit,” approved Christopher. 

Lighting another cigarette, he helped me clear 
the table and put the kitchen in order; then I went 
out and helped him bring in the hoe and wheel- 
barrow. After that, we sat on the front steps and 
looked across the valley, glimmering now in the 
early starlight. 

I had had my first lesson in simplicity and had 
learned it so easily that I thought I had written it 
myself, 


IV 


HE H. C. of L. was less explanatory in its 
methods than Christopher, but it was quite 
as emphatic. I felt its influence from the 

first, but for a long time I did not understand how 
beneficent it was. In fact it enabled me to repeat 
the piquant experience of shock and surprise I had 
undergone when I discovered that I really did not 
want another Bridget. 

In the city, out of touch with raw materials, I 
had had only the vaguest idea of the significance of 
the familiar initials; but in the country, buying and 
cooking my food myself, I understood why people 
everywhere made such a fuss about them. And 
I proceeded to augment the fuss. Why, of course! 
Some reactions are so inevitable that one does not 
even have to take the trouble to think about them. 

‘Dear, dear! this is all wrong,” I said, frown- 
ing over the grocer’s slips. ‘‘Why, I’m sure I 
remember that Bridget used to get three pounds of 
butter for a dollar.” Loudly I joined in all the 
protesting discussions my neighbors held. The 


22 


Mountain Verities 23 


state of affairs was intolerable. What were we 
going to do about it? How long would it last? 

Meantime, I studied cook books and made a 
collection of recipes filched from all sorts of 
journals (my literary taste was enlarging under the 
stimulus of my new interest), and learned how to 
prepare meals that cost relatively very little and 
pleased us amply well. 

Then one day, when we were lingering over one 
of my economical desserts (lingering, mind you, 
because it was good, not for the contrary reason), 
Christopher’s eye fell on a paragraph in the daily 
paper from which he was reading me scraps and he 
sang out: 

‘“Here’s good news for you. Food prices are 
about to drop appreciably.” 

I applauded heartily, as every reason—objective 
and subjective—seemed to bid me applaud. Then 
I sat silent, eating my pudding and marvelling at 
something in my heart which I did not understand. 

“What's the matter?” asked Christopher by and 
by, regarding me curiously. 

I pushed back my plate and looked up and met 
Christopher’s eyes; my own, I am sure, were full 
of perplexity. 

“I don’t know,” I answered. ‘“‘Of course it’s 
absurd—there’s some mental quirk which escapes 


24 Mountain Verities 


me—but when you read that about falling prices, 
my—why, my heart fell too. It’s utterly gro- 
tesque. You haven't noticed any signs of derange- 
ment about me lately, have you?” 

Christopher continued to gaze at me a moment, 
then he threw back his head and laughed in a 
manner which [ found both bewildering and re- 
assuring. 

“You funny woman!” he said. “You've out- 
done yourself, you’ve broken your own record. 
And you haven’t the least idea of it either. The 
truth of the matter is that you like the H. C. 
of L.!” 

I was more shocked than when he had told me 
I didn’t want a cook. 

‘‘But—but, Christopher!” I gasped helplessly. 

‘Yes, you do,” he insisted. ‘And now that I’ve 
noticed it, I’m not surprised; I only wonder I didn’t 
see it long ago. For the thing’s perfectly rational 
in you. The H. C. of L. holds you right down to 
the business of learning your lesson of simplicity — 
and practicing it. Whereas, without it, your old 
luxurious habits might give you trouble. You're 
grateful to the H. C. of L., and you have every 
sensible reason for being so.”’ 

“But how utterly, hatefully selfish in me!” I 


Mountain Verities 25 


murmured after 2 moment of stricken introspec- 
tion. 

“Oh, I don’t mean that if you had a chance to 
abolish the H. C. of L., you'd vote for its con- 
tinuance,”’ Christopher comforted me. “You'd re- 
member how many other people are suffering be- 
cause of it. Our reactions aren’t always simple, 
you know. It’s possible to like a thing for oneself 
and hate it for all the rest of the world.” 

‘Not quite all the rest of the world in this case,” 
I went on presently, following out the new line of 
thought which had opened before me. ‘There 
must be many people like you and me who, 
whether they know it or not, are the better and 
happier for the H. C. of L.” 

“Of course,” Christopher nodded. “And if 
God’s in His heaven (as I suppose He still is, after 
all), the H. C. of L. is probably one of His best 
snails on the thorn.” 

“Christopher,” I replied earnestly, ‘‘that’s a 
very significant and illuminating remark.” 

“It’s hard on the others though,” I resumed 
after yet another pause of meditation, ‘‘all those 
who really can’t get enough to eat. How long do 
you suppose it’s going to take us to learn?” 

Christopher sighed. 

“We're an extravagant nation. We have 


26 Mountain Verities 


always eaten too much and thrown too much away. 
Habits are hard to break. But we make a begin- 
ning when we realize our indebtedness to the 
H. C. of L. You've made a beginning today. 
Why don’t you stop condoling with your neighbors 
over prices and take to congratulating them?” 

We both smiled at the thought of the sensation 
I should produce: 

“Good morning, Mrs. Wood. Isn't it fine that 
oranges are so expensive? We shall all of us have 
to confine ourselves to prunes and baked apples, 
and thus we shall be a step nearer the ultimate 
beauty of simplicity.’ 

“Well,” I concluded, “I may have made a be- 
ginning, but the very nature of it shows that I don’t 
trust myself. I ought to love simplicity so securely 
that prices have nothing whatever to do with my 
faithful following.” , 

‘You do in your heart,’ Christopher replied; 
‘‘and as soon as you get rid of your old habits, 
you'll be all right. Just at present, you’re rather 
self-conscious and experimental, and that’s danger- 
ous. Simplicity’s got to become second nature with 
you.” 

‘But then I shan’t realize it and so shan’t enjoy 
it,” I expostulated. 

‘“T wonder.’ Christopher recognized the point 


Mountain Verities 27 


and felt it as keenly as I did, for we were both 
savoring the new beauty and dignity which our life 
had acquired since we began eliminating superflu- 
ities. ‘There was Saint Francis and there was 
Thoreau. They both lived austerely and never 
lost their zest. Think of Saint Francis’s praise of 
Lady Poverty, and think of Thoreau’s enthusiasm 
over beans! No, I believe, when things are 
nakedly good and true, you never lose your appre- 
ciation of their beauty. However, it might be as 
well to make the most of our present awareness.” 

Which we proceeded to do. 

Thoreau and Saint Francis were two of the 
people whom my post-war experience had most 
warmly endeared to me. I thought of them often 
as | went about my work. Some ten years ago 
there had been a real Franciscan cult in America 
(aesthetic, not religious), and I had embraced it. 
Now, for the first time, my life was remotely ap- 
proximating its standard. Very remotely, Saint 
Francis would have said, regarding my comfort- 
able, spacious, well-equipped house and my choco- 
late cake. Absurdly luxurious Thoreau would 
have found the variety of viands I set before 
Christopher. But the point was that I did approxi- 
mate. Before the war, I, with the rest of the spon- 
sors of the “Simple Life,” had merely admired and 


28 Mountain Verities 


envied (so we said) and had done nothing about it. 
The state of mind had been one of which I had 
always felt vaguely ashamed. Nor had I cause for 
complacency now, since circumstance rather than 
stalwart decision had prompted my first real 
attempts at discipleship. But I did not care about 
being complacent; I was content to be humbly 
grateful that at last I was in the way of simplicity. 
Perhaps later, if I deserved it, I might have a 
chance to prove my stamina. 

It was even more beautiful than I had thought 
it, this business of simplification: there was such 
freedom about it, such peace, such solidity. It re- 
moved the confusion of life and swept the horizon 
clear; it left plenty of room for the few big 
interests. Can it be that there are people who 
prefer confusion to clarity, who like crowded 
horizons better than ample ones? It would seem 
that there must be, since crowds and confusion per- 
sist. But perhaps most of these people are as help- 
less as I was (or seemed to be) before circum- 
stance gave me a boost. We are all helpless, if the 
truth were told, caught in strange vortices of tradi- 
tion, swept by tides of habit. We seldom know 
clearly just what we want and almost never where 
we are going and what we ought to do. Blind, 
blind is the human race. Probably, at bottom, the 


Mountain Verities 29 


recent war was a product of sheer blindness, un- 
imagined and unintended in its enormity. We all 
blundered into it and then could not get out. In 
like manner we blundered through the Peace Con- 
ference, even our great Wilson somewhat losing 
his way. There are always ‘‘so many sides to a 
question” and human wisdom is so very fallible. 
How shall one take account of all forces and 
render to every man his due? We are still 
blundering. Russia and Ireland, Persia, Egypt 
and India, Mexico, Japan—how crassly we deal 
with them! Shall we never get our eyes open and 
see and learn and understand? What will help 
us? 

Simplicity. It is a golden answer, springing con- 
fidently from the heart of one human experience 
which cannot be fundamentally different from that 
of the rest of mankind. Oh! not that I would 
necessarily have Mr. and Mrs. Lloyd George and 
M. and Mme. Poincaré do their own housework 
and eat corn meal mush. Great principles are 
single, but their methods of application may be 
many and various. I would only have the corn 
meal mush of politics seriously experimented with. 
Simplification, clarification, humiliation: those are 
untried slogans. And why should the affairs and 
relations of states be on a different scale and 


30 Mountain Verities 


governed by different standards from those that 
have been found beneficial among private citizens? 

After all, in the long run, Messrs. Lloyd George 
and Wilson and Harding and Poincaré are potent 
only as we, the common people, allow them to be 
so; they must obey our will. Therefore perhaps 
it will follow that if we individually become 
thoroughly, resolutely sincere and simple and 
genuine, our governments will become so too. 

‘Oh, men and women, come out, come away!” 
It was thus that I generally ended a meditation like 
that suggested above. Frequently, sitting on the 
doorstep, I mentally made the ascent of Green 
Peak in order that I might the more effectively 
launch my voice toward all whom it might concern. 
(Christopher laughed at me for thus using Green 
Peak as a soap box.) ‘‘We are in a most hideous 
muddle these days; we don’t know what we are 
doing or what we ought to do. Come out, come 
away! Let us be still awhile and get rid of every- 
thing that hampers us. Let us listen. Then per- 
haps, by and by, we can take hopeful counsel to- 
gether. Come out, come away!” 


V 


OR how many discoveries was the Great 
War responsible! Mr. Wilson discovered 
the Fourteen Points, Mr. H. G. Wells dis- 

covered God, and I, in my far humbler sphere, dis- 
covered my kitchen. | 

They, my betters, could not contain themselves 
in the matter of the revelations which had been 
granted them, they could talk of little else; and, 
in like manner, I was possessed to talk of my 
kitchen. In season and out of season, to sympa- 
thetic and to indifferent ears,I prated of the novel 
joys of cooking. 

It is said that trained theologians and even a 
good many just ordinary Christians smiled in their 
sleeves at the naive effusions of ‘God, the Invisible 
King’; and I am sure my country neighbors had 
many a hearty laugh behind my back when I had 
finished telling them about my muffins and ginger- 
bread. From my excitement, one might have sup- 
posed that I had invented all recipes, that I and no 
one else had discovered the wisdom of starting 


31 


32 Mountain Verities 


gingerbread in a cold oven, that I and none before 
me had learned the various adaptabilities of corn 
starch. But, just as Mr. Wells set certain other 
people thinking along lines which they had never 
followed before, so I flatter myself I jogged the 
imaginations of some of my friends. 

‘Well, now tell me what you have been doing,” 
said one of the summer cottagers, newly returned, 
when she had made an end of narrating the social 
and civic activities which had occupied her during 
the winter. 

‘‘T?” I sat up and felt my face kindle; I was even 
absurdly aware that my voice vibrated. ‘‘Well, 
just before I came over to see you, I took three 
_ loaves of bread out of the oven. They smelt de- 
licious. Their tops were brown and crusty, and 
their sides were tender. I hope—lI think—l be- 
lieve they were very good.” | 

‘Bread?’ My friend was taken aback. “I’m 
afraid that means that you have no maid yet. But 
you can buy bread at the store.”’ 

She did not understand. Why should she? 

‘But bread-making is the best fun of all,” I went 
on earnestly, “because it is the most fundamental 
and necessary. It is symbolic. I’d rather make 
bread than anything else. No, we have no maid 
and we're not going to have one.”’ 


Mountain Verities 33 


“Is there really none to be had?” 

My friend was sympathetic. Still she did not 
understand. 

“Yes, we could have had one.”’ Then I decided 
it was time I enlightened her. ‘‘You see, some- 
thing has happened to me; I’ve been converted, 
I’ve seen a great light. I’ve discovered that the 
kitchen is the most interesting room in the house, 
and that nothing is quite so much fun as cooking.”’ 

For a long time, as I unfolded my topic, -my 
friend remained incredulous. Probably, like 
everyone else, she thought me a little mad. And, 
naturally, my past record stood in my way. But 
genuine enthusiasm carries conviction with it; and 
by and by, as I continued to talk, I saw her eyes 
kindle with a doubtful sort of response. 

“You almost convince me,” she said; “but I still 
don’t in the least understand. I thought you hated 
cooking, I thought you had tried it once and had 
made a complete failure of it. Do you mean to 
tell me that suddenly now you can do it and do it 
well?” 

I nodded. 

“Tt’s conversion,’ I re-explained. “It’s a 
changed point of view. That makes all the dif- 
ference. Oh! if I didn’t have so much to say about 
puddings and soufflés nowadays I could hold forth 


34 Mountain Verities 


at length on the abstract theme of the point of 
view. No, it’s not bromidic; you needn’t look 
bored. Platitudes aren’t bromidic. They’re the 
deep wisdom of the race with which our somewhat 
too garrulous parents insist that we shall all be 
endowed in our cradles, but from which life pro- 
tects us until we are able to deal with them. Then 
suddenly we discover them as unsuspected treas- 
ures lying right under our eyes, as significant pic- 
tures taking shape out of a blind tangle of lines. 
They come to us with all the humor and surprise of 
something which we have complacently supposed 
ourselves to have outgrown. Chastening and 
illuminating experience! Two months ago I'd 
have looked bored too, if someone had told me 
that the point of view makes a great difference; 
but now I want to tell everyone that it’s true, it’s 
truce.’ 

My friend laughed. 

‘“Tt’s lucky for you that a belief in miracles is 
coming into fashion again. Otherwise, you’d 
never get anyone in the world to believe you. But 
I’m interested. Mary Jane’s wages are increasing 
alarmingly. Perhaps I'll come over some morning 
and watch you at work.” 

She spoke of course in entire innocence and sin- 
cerity; but if she had taken counsel with some imp 


Mountain Verities 35 


of malice, she could not have made a neater thrust 
at my weakest point. It brought me tumbling 
from my high horse. 

“Alas!” I confessed. “I can’t work unless I’m 
entirely alone.” | : 

“Ah?” She lifted her eyebrows. ‘That sounds 
as if you didn’t work easily.” 

“It does,” I admitted. ‘‘And yet I believe the 
unsociable trait is common to cooks. I know all 
our Bridgets had it. Not one of them really wel- 
comed me to the kitchen when she was busy there. 
Poor things! ‘They couldn’t frankly turn me out 
as [ turn out people who get in my way; they could 
only sulk. I tell you, my retrospective understand- 
ing of our various Bridgets increases every day.” 

My friend shook her head, skeptical again. 

‘I don’t want to do anything on such a desperate 
edge of suspense that I can’t bear to have anyone 
inthe same room. No, I guess I’ll go without new 
shoes and a new hat and keep Mary Jane awhile 
longer.” 

That “desperate edge of suspense’ sounded 
well, it was a telling phrase; but it did not quite 
seem to fit my case as I pondered it in my kitchen 
that night when I was getting supper. Certainly 
I was in no suspense then, and there were no edges 
to my mood; but I knew that if the door were to 


36 Mountain Verities 


open and anyone save Christopher were to enter 
(when was Christopher ever de trop?), I should 
bristle with inner expostulation: ‘‘Please go away, 
go away!’ What was the real reason for this 
unsociability? As it adumbrated itself before me, 
I knew it for something positive and vital, rooted 
in common sense; and as it began to take shape, it 
brought an unexpected vision of the library across 
my imagination. Of course, that was it: in the 
library, reading or writing, I could not bear to 
be interrupted, and nobody dreamed of intrud- 
ing on me without at least an apology. ‘That was 
because I was absorbed in what I was doing, en- 
tirely given over to my book or my pen. Well, I 
was likewise absorbed in the kitchen, wholly in- 
tent; and when I was interrupted I suffered a shock 
of recall and distraction which was demoralizing. 
People did not understand this, and so they came 
breezily bursting in upon me without compunction 
or warning. “What are you doing? Making a 
cake? CanI help? No? Then I’ll just sit down 
and talk to you a few minutes.” As if a cake were 
not a very jealous god! 

Jealous: again, that was it. The kitchen was 
jealous, it wanted my whole attention and devotion 
and when our harmonious solitude 4 deux was in- 
fringed on, it filled the air with resentment. Not 


Mountain Verities 37 


I alone was responsible for the silent protest which 
made itself felt when our dear company of two 
was crowded by a third. A real affair of the 
heart, with all its traditional ear marks, was in- 
triguing the kitchen and me. 

Thus, to my exoneration, did I reason the 
matter out and forgive myself; but the fact that I 
needed exoneration was damaging, and I am afraid 
I was guilty of a good deal of apparent rudeness 
that first summer of my domesticity. Tactful host- 
esses who do their own housework should make 
their guests ‘‘feel at home” by letting them share in 
the daily tasks. ‘Now give me an apron and set 
me to work’’: that was only a decent and friendly 
demand, and I was ashamed of myself that my 
heart sank to hear it. Several times I acceded 
and, after pointing out the habitations of the mix- 
ing bowl and the egg beater, the sugar, the flour, 
the salt, the spoons, tried to cooperate in the busi- 
ness of getting the next meal; but always something 
went wrong—the cake fell or it burned, the 
potatoes were under-done, the soup was too thick 
—and inevitably, as a matter of course, the genius 
of the kitchen deserted me. The scope and dignity 
of its function prevented it from being small- 
souled, but its strength and decision of character 
enabled it to insist on having its own way. So, by 


38 Mountain Verities 


and by, I grew frank in my turn and said to my 
guests, ‘I’m awfully sorry, it’s horrid in me, but 
I have to cook alone. Take a book and go out in 
the garden, and I’ll come as soon as [| can.” 

Sometimes I felt a little uneasy about the hold 
which the kitchen had on me. After all, there were 
other interests and duties in life; was I not in dan- 
ger of losing touch with them? But a certain 
element of fatefulness in the situation always per- 
suaded me to acquiescence. This was the present 
chapter which life was giving me to read. 

That being so, I read it deliberately and made 
the most of the healing reassurance I found in it. 
When I had worked in the kitchen before, I had 
hurried to get through my tasks and escape. Now 
I took not only plenty of time but all the time there 
was, and [| refused to hurry save at certain critical 
moments when haste was imperative. ‘The differ- 
ence was marked. I have always thought hurry a 
most demoralizing thing. And, after all, why 
hurry through work you enjoy? 

It was a good summer. As I sat at the kitchen 
table or moved back and forth over the wide, rest- 
ful spaces of the linoleum floor, I pondered many 
things. ‘The soul of the kitchen was my constant 
companion and I was never unaware of it, but I did 
not always remain with it within its blue and white 


Mountain Verities 39 


walls. Sometimes we wandered together far on 
the wings of the salt and pepper, rice and cinnamon 
and tea and other commonplace things we were 
handling. Paths to all the ends of the earth started 
from the cupboard. Then when we came back 
with a rush (perhaps because I had found a spider 
in the spinach) we rejoiced to look up and find the’ 
orchard gazing in at the door and the garden at the 
window and the kettle beginning to sing on the 
stove. Life was sweet, after all; yes, in spite of 
the war and the Peace Conference, it was sweet 
and promising. The war was over and, since 
people were everywhere hungry, they must soon 
forget their enmities in order to help one another 
eat. The Peace Conference was over too, and 
would not the same universal hunger bring about 
an inevitable modification of the vengeful treaty? 
Perhaps, at bottom, wars and councils are not so 
vastly determining as they suppose, and it is always 
in kitchens and orchards and gardens that real 
human history works itself out. This last thought 
was the keynote of my sober gladness, 


VI 


N the last chapter I mentioned the fact that 
my literary taste was enlarging under the 
stimulus of my new interest. The develop- 

ment formed one of the most delightful phases of 
my new freedom. 

Before the war, I am afraid I had been rather 
fastidious in my book preferences. ‘There is no 
snob more offensive than your intellectual snob 
(unless, indeed, it be the religious variety), and, 
realizing this, I had always been ashamed to con- 
fess how many popular books bored me. But the 
truth remained that the scope of my enthusiasm 
had been limited. Now suddenly, with a leap, I 
came to a full, amazing appreciation of values 
which had simply never existed for me before. 
The popular magazines revealed themselves as the 
treasure mines they are, advertisements ceased to 
be negligible, and even “soap order” catalogues 
spoke a new, gracious tongue. 

All people who live in the country know what 
soap order catalogues are. The neighbors’ chil- 


40 


Mountain Verities AI 


dren come around with them two or three times a 
year, asking you—so the formula runs—if you 
want to “‘sign.”” The idea is that you shall permit 
the children to order for you anything, everything, 
from soap to diamond earrings, and that the firm 
represented shall then bestow on said children their 
corresponding choice of anything, everything, from 
plush rocking-chairs to paper dolls. Having a 
fairly conscientious sense of civic responsibility, I 
have all my life made a point of signing soap 
orders; but in my unregenerate days, I used to be 
careless and stupid about it, not making an intelli- 
gent choice—with the result that we were per- 
petually overstocked with boraxine and _ safety 
matches. 

This year, however, the whole transaction pre- 
sented itself to me in a new light. In the first 
place, I was not in a hurry to get back to my desk 
or to a book; I had plenty of leisure and time to 
attend to the small girl, hopefully applying at the 
kitchen door. In the second place, when my eyes 
fell on the familiar catalogue, they, for the first 
time in their experience, found pasture there. A 
new language opened new worlds to me. “Alumi- 
num saucepan,” “magic dishcloth,” “lightning egg 
beater’: what stimulating phrases! ‘Come in,” 


42 Mountain Verities 


I said to the little girl. ‘‘Yes, indeed, I shall be 
very glad to sign an order for you.” 

In the end, I had to send her away, bidding her 
return later in the day; for I simply could not take 
my bearings at once in the midst of all the alluring 
possibilities of that once neglected catalogue. With 
my elbows on the kitchen table and my head in my 
hands, I sat lost to the world for the better part 
of an hour, weighing the respective merits of this 
and that cooking utensil and this and that new 
variety of food. 

‘What have you got there? A new Atlantic?” 
asked Christopher, coming over from the studio 
to see what made me so little in evidence this morn- 
ing. 

‘No, indeed!” I looked up glowingly, not mean- 
ing to cast any slur on The Atlantic by the nature 
of my reply, but, nevertheless, speaking from my 
heart. ‘It’s a soap order catalogue, Christopher, 
and I never read anything so irresistible. Would it 
be extravagant to buy a few new skillets and sauce- 
pans? Bridget left some of ours so badly burned. 
And what do you think this new cereal would taste 
like? Listen. [ll read you the description.” 

Christopher listened with a droll expression of 
amusement and reflection; his eyes danced into 
mine. 


Mountain Verities 43 


“O tempora! o mores!” he said. “The next 
thing I know I shall find you reading The Welcome 
Guest.” 

He was perfectly right there. The Welcome 
Guest was a quite unspeakable monthly publication 
to which I had subscribed at the wistful instigation 
of another neighbor’s child. It cost twenty-five 
cents a year, and its contents were entirely what one 
might expect. Its stories were mush and melo- 
drama and all its advertisements began, ‘Now 
don’t send a penny!’ When, at the beginning of 
every month, it unblushingly arrived arm in arm 
with The Atlantic Monthly, | had always made 
haste to consign it to the scrap-basket. Its pro- 
longed presence on the library table was unthink- 
able. 

But now! but now! yes, Christopher was right. 
When the July number arrived, I opened it and 
carried it out to the kitchen and sat down to see if 
it contained any recipes. It did of course. ‘There 
was one for nut bread which sounded so good that 
I proceeded at once to try it; and when Christo- 
pher praised the result and I confessed the source 
of my inspiration, we laughed merrily. 

“Oh, Christopher! I am free!” I burst out in the 
habitual comment which was becoming a real re- 
frain with me. ‘Free from all sorts of old preju- 


44 Mountain Verities 


dices, free to browse anywhere anyone browses 
and like anything anyone likes. What a prison I 
lived in when I read only ‘literature’! I feel im- 
mensely indebted to The Welcome Guest.” 

As for the cook book which arrived with my 
consignment of soap order products, I should like 
to recommend it to all the world of housewives. 
It cost only thirty-five cents, and it contained a 
better collection of recipes than any of the costlier 
and more pretentious books with which, from time 
to time in our family history, we had supplied our 
various Bridgets. 

‘What a delicious dish!” said two of our 
friends, supping with us for the first time after 
their return from a long sojourn in Paris. “It’s so 
subtle and racy. Did some French chef confide 
the rule to you?” 

“No,” I replied demurely, “it’s a soap order 
aha 

The incident seemed to me typical of the whole 
racy and subtle triumph of the commonplace, the 
lowly and humble, which Christopher and I were 
celebrating that summer. 

Nevertheless, an occasional experience pulled 
me up short with a challenge which set me wonder- 
ing whether my taste might not be deteriorating. 

One day, for instance, I was reading a new 


Mountain Verities A5 


novel (distinctly “literature” for its part) and 
found myself deeply interested in a certain chapter 
which dealt with the post-marital history of the 
heroine. She had married unexpectedly, taking all 
her friends by surprise; and, as soon as the news 
was known, a bevy of older women flocked to give 
her advice. ‘It’s a good plan to boil up your dish- 
cloth in your skillet.” “‘Always remember that egg 
and cheese combinations must cook slowly.” “If 
your bread won't rise, set the pan in warm water.” 
I read these paragraphs absorbedly. They seemed 
to me full of the most pertinent wisdom. What a 
fortunate bride to receive such good counsel! and 
what a fortunate reader was I to be gleaning it 
after her! Then I turned the page and ex- 
perienced a memorable shock. Out flashed the 
author’s face at me from between her clever lines, 
and into my startled mind leaped the realization 
that I had not been intended to take the foregoing 
conversation seriously, that she, the author, had 
been poking fun (gentle, tolerant, large-minded 
fun, but still fun) at the group of women for being 
so prosy and commonplace. Respectful admira- 
tion was the last tribute she had desired from the 
reader. 

It was rather a bitter moment, for of course 
there are few discoveries more humiliating than 


46 Mountain Verities 


that of one’s own failure to discover a humorous 
intention. My cheeks burned. But presently I 
carried the issue, novel and all, out to the studio, 
and there Christopher and I discussed it. 

‘‘Is there a real intellectual danger in finding the 
affairs of the kitchen as important as any other 
affairs?’ I asked. 

Christopher pondered. (He always ponders 
before he answers questions, and the habit is a 
good one—except when I want his judgment on a 
new hat, then it fills me with dismay.) 

‘‘No, I think not,” he said presently. ‘They are 
important if life itself is important, and the only 
way to redeem them from the obloquy which we 
have allowed to be cast upon them is to dignify them. 
But they’re not more important than anything else; 
they're the means, not the end. I think perhaps 
you're in danger of letting the kitchen monopolize 
you.” 

‘Tm afraid you're right,” I sighed dolefully. 
“Yes, I guess, as usual, you’re right, Christopher. 
I’ve been suspecting the danger myself, but I 
haven't wanted to face it. Very well: I'll begin 
the process of emancipation tomorrow.” 

I spoke so soberly that Christopher laughed. 

“Hard lines!’ he sympathized. ‘Especially 


Mountain Verities AT 


when it’s your new-found freedom from which you 
must now seek emancipation.” 

‘‘Isn’t that just like life?’ I protested. ‘‘Para- 
dox crowns paradox, and every truth seems only 
too anxious to defeat itself.” 

‘So that one always has to keep fighting,”’ com. 
mented Christopher. 

“Well, I suppose it’s a good fight,” I ventured 
after a few thoughtful moments. “The fight for 
freedom. The very incessancy of it keeps the spirit 
alert. My kitchen gave me my freedom; now [ 
suspect it of an insidious tendency to enslave me in 
its turn. It must be circumvented. Yes, I'll begin 
tomorrow.” 

I sighed again and went back to the kitchen 
where I spent all the rest of the day, baking and 
brewing and stewing and having a glorious time. 
My intention, I told myself, was to clear the way 
for a new program tomorrow; but really it was to 
make the most of my present servitude. 


VII 


S a matter of fact, my dealings with my 
kitchen fell naturally into three divisions. 
First, I had to learn how to cook at all. 
Second, I had to learn how to cook easily. Third, 
I had to learn how to cook and do anything else. 
The first two divisions merged rather imper- 
ceptibly into each other. By dint of doing only a 
few things at a time and doing them frequently, I 
soon acquired a repertoire of recipes which I knew 
by heart. If I were to draw up a list of sugges- 
tions for the beginning housewife, one of the chief 
of them would be: get your rules by heart. It is 
disturbing and hampering to have to stop in the 
middle of the preparation of a dish and run to the 
cook book to find out what you must do next. The 
art of cooking, as possibly the art of living in 
general, lies in freedom and confidence. I never 
allowed myself to take on more than one or two 
new recipes at a time and tried to be as severe 
with myself in the matter of consulting the cook 
book as I used to be when I was studying Latin and 


48 


Mountain Verities AQ 


had a tendency to look up the same word in the 
lexicon half a dozen times. This was of course not 
easy, since the tendency was inherent. One particu- 
lar recipe for graham bread memorized itself almost 
automatically except for the single item of salt, 
and there it baffled me repeatedly. Half a tea- 
spoon, a quarter of a teaspoon: which? And it 
makes a difference how much or how little salt one 
puts in a dish. But even this point I mastered in 
time and learned to make graham bread with posi- 
tive abandon. 

The second and third divisions, however, of my 
kitchen experience were sharply defined, and my 
graduation from one into the other was difficult. 
The kitchen itself did all it could to hinder me. 

I had never known such a wilful apartment. 
Vaguely uneasy I had become during the long 
summer weeks which [ had spent at the sink or the 
bread board or hovering over the stove, realizing 
more and more clearly the force and decision of 
the personality which had me in hand, realizing 
also the fullness of my own response. But I had 
not dreamed the invisible net was being cast and 
folded so tight about me. When, in recognition of 
the wisdom of Christopher’s warning, I decided to 
leave the kitchen and spend the most of the morning 


50 Mountain Verities 


in the shamefully neglected garden, I found that I 
simply could not do it. 

But, no, the discovery was not so direct and im- 
mediate as that sounds; the kitchen was too clever. 

I washed the breakfast dishes and put them in 
the rack to drain; then I took off my apron and 
started for the door. It was half-past eight, the 
preparation of dinner ought not to take me more 
than an hour; what a good long spell of weeding [ 
could have! But at the corner of the kitchen table 
I paused. I had neglected to wipe off some crumbs 
and some splashes of milk left from the getting of 
breakfast. A return to the sink and a few passes 
with the damp dishrag rectified this omission, and 
again I essayed departure. ‘‘Hadn’t you better 
look at the bread board in the pantry?” a small, 
deprecating voice breathed in my inner ear. Of 
course! There] ad been mice in the pantry lately, 
and I was trying to be careful to leave no crumbs 
of food about. Once more I returned to the 
sink for the dishrag and betook myself to the 
pantry. 

Now the pantry is a delightful spot. Its win- 
dow opens to the south and looks into a cool green 
arbor in summer and straight into the mildly glow- 
ing heart of the low sun in winter. It smells of 
fresh bread and spices and coffee and all sorts of 


Mountain Verities 51 


pleasant things. Though an integral part of the 
kitchen, it seems to possess an explicit soul of its 
own. It received me cheerfully this morning. 
“Oh, there you are! I knew you'd be coming soon 
to try that new recipe for spice cookies. You're in 
the nick of time, for the robins in the arbor are 
trying to get their last brood off the nest and you 
can watch them as you work.” 

I hesitated, but in spite of the proverb, I was 
not immediately lost; for there were some cup 
cakes left over for supper; and the cookies could 
wait. The young robins were a temptation—say, 
rather, an excuse—but, no, I removed the crumbs 
from the bread board and turned away. 

The kitchen was chagrined at this failure, it 
had evidently counted on my prompt capitulation. 
There was a note of impatience in the tone with 
which it once more called me back from the door. 
‘What a housewife! You've forgotten to fill the 
tank of the oil heater. It will burn out in no time; 
then your wick will be charred, and moreover you 
won't have any hot water to wash your hands when 
you come in from that ridiculous garden.” 

I could not deny the relevancy of this reminder 
nor be ungrateful for it. For the third time J 
turned back, and this time, in view of the nature of 
my impending task, I resumed my apron. As I did 


—~ 


52 Mountain Verities 


so, I seemed to hear the kitchen give a stir and a 
chuckling sigh of satisfaction. ‘‘Oh! it’s only for 
a moment,” I flung back over my shoulder at it as 
I headed for the oil can in the wood-shed. 

Having my apron on, however, and perceiving 
that the wick of the oil heater needed rubbing, I 
thought I might as well take another minute and a 
half to secure a clear flame. So I opened the 
broom closet door to get a cleaning rag, and there 
I was confronted with such a pile of dish towels 
that I knew there could be no others left anywhere 
in the house. All in need of boiling up? Alas! 
yes, or they would not have been thus cast aside. 
Well, then, if I expected to have anything with 
which to dry my dinner glass and silver, I must get 
this pile into hot soapy water and over the fire at 
once. I hauled them out of their basket and into 
the dish-pan and set them to boil. 

How about the garden now? Was it worth 
while to get my hands as dirty as I always get them 
when weeding if, in half an hour, I should have to 
stop and clean them up again in order to rinse the 
dish towels? No, I had much better wait. After 
all, it was only nine o'clock; the morning was still 
young. And, while I was waiting, I might as well 
make a rice pudding for dinner; that would save 
time. 


Mountain Verities 53 


One hour later, Christopher came over from 
the studio, remonstrance in his face. 

“Here! I thought you were going to keep out 
of the kitchen this morning,” he said. 

I turned around from the bread board where, 
after all, I was cutting out cookies. 

“H’sh!” I temporized. ‘One of the young 
robins is just about to fly. I—I—why, yes, I was, 
Christopher; but, you see, one thing after another 
happened, and I—really, I couldn’t help it.” 

“You don’t seem very sorry.” 

“No,” I confessed. 

“Well, I think you ought to be. Aren’t you 
ashamed, you a mature, intelligent woman, to be 
a slave to a mere room?” 

‘“There’s nothing very mere about these cookies, 
anyway, Christopher,” I replied beguilingly. ‘‘It’s 
a capital recipe. Wait. IT Il get you one. Ah! 
don’t scold me or laugh at me. I know—it’s been 
a failure. But, at least, I’ve got my eyes open to it 
and I think I know how it happened. [ll try 
again tomorrow.” 

Christopher could not help agreeing with me 
that the cooky recipe was excellent, and he went 
back to the studio without another word. 

The next morning I took special pains to see 
that the kitchen was in order—crumbs brushed, 


54 Mountain Verities 


stoves filled, towels hung to dry—before I re- 
moved my apron. Then I took it off with a rush 
and went straight out into the garden. 

It was a lovely morning. The dew was just 
dried from the grass, and the midsummer air was 
full of freshness and fragrance. Robins were hop- 
ning over the lawn, a red-eyed vireo was “‘preach- 
ing’ in one of the maple trees. The garden was 
blooming sweetly. ‘Tall spires of blue larkspur 
stood out against the orchard background, and 
some white peonies lingered; the mallows and holly- 
hocks were in their prime. As for the weeds—! 
I surveyed them, ashamed, and, dropping on 
my knees by a forest of them, went vigorously to 
work, 

For fifteen minutes, I had every appearance, to 
myself and to whom it might concern—the robins 
and vireos perhaps—of absolute contentment. I 
worked with real zest, and my articulate thoughts 
congratulated me: ‘‘How good it is to be outdoors 
again! After all, I’ve missed it. It was high time 
I broke away. How sweet the air is, how pleasant 
the sun, and what a heavenly light on the hills!” 
But of course the effect of one’s articulate 
thoughts is nothing compared with the power of 
the hidden, silent processes that go on beneath | 
one’s consciousness, and not all the congratulations 


Mountain Verities 55 


in the world could give me the peace of mind which 
I seemed to have that morning. I was uneasy, 
divided; without looking at it to recognize it, I 
was blindly keeping something at bay. By and by 
I realized that the specious blitheness of my mood 
had ceased to parade itself and that I was working 
tensely, using my weeding fork as a foil. So then, 
as I hate division of being, I sat back on my heels 
and took counsel with myself. What was the 
matter? Why was I not wholly given over to the 
sun and the wind and the soil as one should be 
when gardening? I brushed a lock of hair from 
my eyes with an impatient and—considering the 
state of my hands—a highly damaging gesture. 
The summer hills would have seemed to be my 
natural counsellors in this predicament (like the 
psalmist, I have always been wont to lift up my 
eyes), but it was not toward them that my gaze 
travelled as I waited on enlightenment. Rather, it 
was, by way of the flower beds and the lawn, in- 
evitably, irresistibly, toward the kitchen window. 
I had left it open and now I found I could look in 
as far as the kitchen table, could see the dishes I 
had set to drain (they must be dry by this time) 
and the basket of vegetables Christopher had 
brought in from the garden. Beans: were those 
beans? Well, I must be sure to cook them a little 


56 Mountain Verities 


longer than the other day when they were not 
so tender as they should have been. What time 
had I started them then? And what time was it 
now? Perhaps, for the sake of safety, I had 
better go and glance in at the kitchen window, first 
to make sure they were beans in truth, and second 
to consult the kitchen clock. 

Safety, forsooth! Ironical term! As I stood, 
looking in at the window, with my weeding fork 
dangling from my hand, I knew myself to be in an 
extremity of danger. ‘The kitchen clock tried to 
save me by emphasizing the fact that it was only 
half-past nine. But I did not turn away from its 
pointing hands and warning bell as I should have 
done. Instead, I continued to stand gazing in at 
the window. How cool and quiet it was in there! 
The garden was lovely and fragrant, yes; but the 
mounting sun seemed to promise a hot day. More- 
over, though weeding is an admirable occupation, 
the physical attitude it imposes is_ certainly 
fatiguing. It would be pleasant to sit for awhile 
in a chair and, say, peel potatoes. 

Potatoes! Why, come to think of it, there were 
none prepared for dinner; and neither had I so 
much as decided what I should have for dessert. 
Since the day was warm, something cool would be 
acceptable—gelatine, for instance. But gelatine 


Mountain Verities 57 


ought to be made early and set in the refrigerator. 
What if I went in and made it now? I dropped 
my weeding fork. 

Among all the welcomes which my kitchen has 
from time to time given me, none lives more 
sweetly in my memory than that morning’s recep- 
tion. As I stood in the doorway and looked in, my 
heart went out to it. It did not triumph too much, 
it simply welcomed, opening all its shaded orderly 
spaces to my inhabiting. How infinitely restful it 
looked after what I was now pleased to think of 
as the heat and glare of the garden, how immensely 
simplified after all those weeds! I washed my 
hands too thoroughly to think of returning to the 
flower beds and did not leave the kitchen again 
until dinner was ready. 

But Christopher took me gravely to task for this 
second failure. 

“No,” he replied to my feeble protest (of, 
“After all, why not?’’), “if man shall not live by 
bread alone, neither, surely, ought woman to live 
in a mixing bowl. In fact, it seems to me that you 
lose the whole honor and dignity of your cooking 
unless you make some spiritual use of the life 
which your bread nourishes. You don’t want to 
forget how to read, do you—or to write—or to 
pray and meditate?” 


58 Mountain Verities 


“T do the last two things in the kitchen,” I inter- 
polated. 

“Well, honestly,’—he held his point—“I do 
think you’re in danger (perhaps we both are) of 
a narrowing down of interest which is quite a dif- 
ferent thing from simplicity. I don’t know how 
you're going to manage it, but I advise you to con- 
quer that kitchen of yours before it’s too late.” 

The advice was sound. I myself had been scent- 
ing the peril which lies in dear simplicity. But I 
never was much of a conqueror and knew I should 
have scant success in recourse to methods of 
violence. Persuasion was my line. Could I per- 
suade the kitchen that, in the interests of the full- 
ness of reality which we both had at heart, it must 
modify its claim on me? A few days later I had 
a chance to put the matter to the test (rather, it 
spontaneously put itself) and met with a success 
which astonished me. 

It was a rainy day, warm and still and full of 
the feeling of growth and fruitfulness. Christopher 
had headed straight from the breakfast table for the 
studio, with a creative expression in his eyes which 
had stirred something in me. I mused over the 
dishpan and fell into deep meditation before the 
oil stove. 

“See here,’’ I said to the kitchen at last, “‘this ia 


Mountain Verities 59 


a great day for the kind of work I used to do be- 
fore you ‘came into my life.’ You remember you 
gave me the theme of a story the other day? Well, 
I’d like to go upstairs and write it this morning. 
Will you let me?” 

Behold! I was free. There was no demur, no 
calling back, no reminding of crumbs or other 
neglected duties, no suggestions of any kind. No 
sulking, either. When, at the end of three hours, 
complete immersion in my long neglected ink 
bottle, I came to myself with a start and saw that 
it was time to get dinner, the kitchen received me 
no less friendlily than usual. It seemed to realize 
that the new phase on which we had suddenly and 
tacitly entered was one of new opportunity for it. 
It would not compete with my study, but would 
supplement it, supplying just the restful and steady- 
ing influence which the rather harassing business of 
writing needs. It lent itself to my tardy manipula- 
tions so efficiently that dinner was made ready in 
record time. 

I cannot account for this consummation on any 
hard and fast logical grounds, cannot really explain 
it at all. ‘The facts were that, one day, I had spent 
the whole morning in the kitchen preparing a 
simple meal, and that, the next day, spending most 
of the morning at my desk, I nevertheless pre- 


60 Mountain Verities 


pared as good a dinner as usual and set some early 
apples to bake into the bargain. Christopher says 
that I really wanted to write my story, whereas I 
only half wanted (perhaps not even half) to weed 
the garden. But, though that accounts for my 
share of the transaction, it does not explain the 
kitchen’s acquiescence or the mechanical accom- 
plishment of work in one-third of the usual time. 

Or, after all, does it? Is there perhaps not 
really anything mechanical about our human life? 
Is it all fluid and docile, ready to adapt itself to 
the demands and purposes of the spirit which ani- 
mates it? And is that spirit all one and the same, 
operating in the study, the studio, and the kitchen, 
with pens and brushes and mixing spoons? So 
that one has only to desire and purpose intensely 
enough to accomplish anything one chooses—and 
everything else at the same time. The speculation 
throws light on the ancient belief in “Brownies.” 
Perhaps the gracious tribe of little men symbolized 
a groping realization that man’s environment asks 
nothing better than to help him if it gets a fair, 
free chance. 

However this may be, my kitchen has now 
ceased to monopolize me; but it remains as good a 
friend as I have in the world, and I return to it 
from other occupations with an unfailing sense of 


Mountain Verities 61 


gratification. When other housewives tell me that 
cooking takes all their time, that they can’t do any- 
thing else, I reply, “Yes, I know, it will if you let it. 
But it needn’t; believe me, it needn’t. Try earn- 
estly enough to do something else too and you'll 
find that you can. Only try.” 


Vill 


AS Mr. H. G. Wells found himself on 
better terms with churchmen and theolo- 
gians since he discovered God and wrote 

‘God, the Invisible King’? I certainly have found 
myself on better terms with my neighbors since 
I discovered my kitchen. 

There are several of them, to right and to left 
and up “the hill road.” ‘Though we stand apart 
from the village, we have a neighborhood. They 
are mostly farmers’ families, Vermonters of the 
‘good old stock,” and I have known them so long 
and so well that I never should have supposed our 
relationship needed any improving. 

And yet perhaps that is not strictly true. As I 
look back, I seem to remember wondering, in the 
old days, why I did not more often drop in on this 
and that neighbor and why she did not more fre- 
quently come to see me. Once in a long time my 
wonderment went so far as to prompt me to a 
deliberate ‘‘dropping’’ which meant well, which 

62 


Mountain Verities 63 


was wholly sincere, but which never seemed to 
accomplish what I desired of it. 

To begin with, I never went “‘just as I was,’’ but 
always saw to it that my hair was in order and my 
dress presentable. ‘Then, instead of applying at 
my neighbor’s kitchen door, I mounted her front 
steps. Sometimes, to be sure, my polite knockings 
fell on deaf rooms and I had, after all, to descend 
the steps and go around to the rear of the house. 
But my welcome there, though cordial enough, gen- 
erally contained an element of embarrassment, 
sometimes even bordering on consternation. “You 
couldn’t make anyone hear? Dear, dear! that’s 
a shame; I was just finishing up my work and had 
all the doors shut. Will you go back, or—well, 
yes, of course, you can come right in this way, but 
I’m afraid my kitchen’s not in very good order. 
I’m sorry; but, you see, there’s always so much to 
do ”? 

Here my flushing hostess was apt to break off, 
looking at me deprecatingly. How should I “see” 
—I who had Bridget to do all my seeing for me— 
how should I know anything about it? Fluttering 
before me, she led me as swiftly as possible 
through kitchen and dining-room to the apartments 
of state in the front of the house. There she 





64 Mountain Verities 


snatched off her apron and put a hand to her hair 
and sat down to receive my call. 

What did we talk about? The weather. The 
health of the neighborhood. The new minister, 
if there was one. The—the—really, there was 
little else. In those barren days I was supposed to 
be too high-minded to care about gossip; perhaps 
I even deluded myself that I was! It would have 
been tactless and stupid in me to have introduced 
the subject of new books, for the chances were that 
my hostess did not know nor care much about 
them. Equally futile on her part would have been 
an account of her recent jelly and pickle making. 
We shared so little ground in common that we 
were obliged to tread gingerly, and sometimes only 
abject repetition saved us from falling into 
abysmal silences. | 

No wonder I was not often moved to repeat 
calls like that! 

But as soon as I began to do my own cooking, 
there came a marked change in my social status, 
and I woke up to find myself for the first time a 
thoroughly recognized member of the community. 
Not having anticipated this and not yet under- 
standing the intensive knowledge which all country 
neighbors possess of one another’s affairs, I was 
as puzzled as I was pleased by the new friendli- 


Mountain Verities 65 


mess in the faces which paused now and then to 
greet me over my fence and by the unprecedented 
familiarity of our easy intercourse. Was it mental 
telepathy that prompted everyone to address me 
on culinary themes? 

“You see, I’m doing my own housework now,” 
il said one morning, feeling, for my part, that 
some explanation should be forthcoming in face of 
my appeal to a passing neighbor on the subject of 
custard pie. 

She gave me a curious look, the look of a polite 
person who has “heard that story before” and is 
going to be put to it to laugh spontaneously. Then 
she decided to be frank. After all, why in the 
world had she lingered by my gate if not just be- 
cause she recognized the new bond between us? 

“Yes, so I’ve heard,” she stated. 

I was surprised. This conversation took place 
early in the summer. Who could have told her? 
How could anyone have guessed? 

“Dear me!” I ventured. “And do you know 
that I had to give all my bread dough to Mrs. Rose’s 
chickens the other day because I had scalded the 
yeast; and that my layer cake frosting hardened 
so fast that I couldn’t get it out of the pan, and 
we had to chop it up and eat it as candy; and 


66 Mountain Verities 


that I scorched some scalloped potatoes until even 
the Woods’ pig wouldn’t touch them?” 

Again she hesitated for just the fraction of a 
second, and I saw in her eyes a brief balance between 
her old and new attitudes towards me. Then the 
latter prevailed, and she nodded and laughed. I 
could straightway have hugged her. ‘The realiza- 
tion that my affairs had been discussed and laughed 
at in the neighborhood did not annoy me; on the 
contrary, I found myself immensely flattered by 
it. Country gossip an offense? Why, it is pre- 
cisely the highest tribute one’s neighbors can give; 
it proves that one is living interestingly. A warm 
_ wave of pleasure broke over me, and I drew a long 
breath for the sheer delight and wonder of it. 

‘Would you mind coming into the house,” I 
asked, “and seeing if I’ve got the dough for my 
pie crust of the right consistency? ‘The last time 
it was so tough that poor Christopher could hardly 
eat it.” 

There is one point about humility that, so it 
seems to me, has not been sufficiently indicated in 
the various homilies on the subject. Unless, in- 
deed, it is wrapt up in the Beatitudes. ‘That is the 
tremendous social advantage it gives its victim. 
Superior people are liked, if at all, only in spite of 
their superiority; and the liking generally has a 


Mountain Verities 67 


string to it. But inferior people call forth the 
whole-hearted affection of their comrades. Heaven 
knows there was never anything really superior 
about me in the old days (Bridget knew there 
wasn’t too, and she treated me accordingly) ; but 
my absorption in books and ink bottles and my un- 
concern for the things of the pantry and the flour 
barrel kept my neighbors at a distance, gave them 
no engaging chance to look down on me. How 
could they then regard me with anything but indif- 
ferent respect? Now I was suddenly down where 
all human beings belong, in the ranks of those who 
struggle and fail, who must be helped, who have 
a claim on human sympathy. The difference was 
revolutionary. 

I cannot remember (so spontaneous was the 
action) whether I first began running in at my 
neighbors’ kitchen doors or whether they first be- 
gan running in at mine. Just as we were—oh, 
certainly, yes!—with flour on our sleeves and 
dough on our finger tips. 

‘Say, can you lend me a spoonful of soda? I’ve 
just found that I’m all out.” 

“Oh, Mrs. Wood, please tell me: is there noth- 
ing one can do with a custard that has separated ?” 

No more apologies were proffered to me be- 
cause of disorderly kitchens. Had not everyone 


68 Mountain Verities 


seen (or heard) for herself that my kitchen also 
was at times in wild confusion? ‘There were no 
more silences. On the contrary, Mrs. Wood and 
I found so much to talk about that I invariably out- 
stayed my intention with her and got home too late 
to put her advice in immediate practice. I was one 
with them all, I was a country woman, I was a real 
human being. Moreover, I was an ignorant soul, 
sadly in need of enlightenment. The result was a 
social success which I found intoxicating. 

Let those frequent brilliant drawing-rooms who 
will. Wit is there, doubtless, and beauty and mirth 
and some wisdom. But give me Mrs. Wood's 
kitchen, with the warm welcome of the two women 
—mother and grandmother—and the laughter of 
two dear children and the rapid, spontaneous flow 
of conversation on themes that matter vitally. 
Some drawing-room themes matter vitally, too, but 
many of them do not; and there is all too often 
about their treatment a certain self-consciousness 
which impairs them. When people come to- 
gether for the abstract purpose of talking, they 
are apt to find but an academic value in what they 
have to say. Whereas, when they fly together be- 
cause of a human situation which must be met, a 
problem solved, a difficulty mastered, their talk 
is as directly related to life as a flower to its stem. 


Mountain Verities 69 


In drawing-rooms, people think about what they 
are going to say, shape their phrases beforehand, 
suppress and embroider. In kitchens, everything 
at all to the purpose tumbles out pell-mell, but con- 
cisely too, in order that time be not lost. Draw- 
ing-room conversation is more artistic; kitchen talk 
is racier, closer to the soil. More universally im- 
portant too: yes, I think that can fairly be claimed. 
For drawing-room themes, no matter how impor- 
tant they may be in themselves and therefore ought 
to appear to everyone, as a fact seem important 
only to the few who handle them; whereas, kitchen 
themes are important, and seem very much so, to 
every human being. Food is sacred. It certainly 
is; and we may as well get rid of the hypocritical, 
mock-transcendentalism with which we sometimes 
profess to scorn it. It is the oil which keeps alight 
the heaven-kindled flame. (Perhaps, by the way, 
the Foolish Virgins were mock-transcendentalists. ) 
Oh! lobster salad is not sacred, no; nor paté de 
foie gras, nor terrapin. But bread and milk and 
fruit and eggs and corn meal mush—the simpler 
the holier. Food is our daily necessity and is also 
the symbol of our hospitality, our brotherhood, our 
religion. Whether they know it or not all people 
are concerned in discussions between cooks. 

All to the good, therefore, was the effect of my 


70 Mountain Verities 


new interest on my relations with my immediate 
neighbors. But I am afraid some of my village 
acquaintances (‘city people,” ‘“‘summer  cot- 
tagers’) took over a share of the embarrassment 
which the country people had dropped. Our 
kitchen is far from the front door, and ceremoni- 
ous rappings of callers did not always reach my 
ears. [he result was that, now and then, an ex- 
quisite vision would appear in the kitchen doorway, 
inquiring, ‘I beg your pardon. I couldn’t make 
anyone hear. Can you tell me if Mrs. ” Then 
a frank stare and a look of confusion and—per- 
haps, after all, it was | who took over most of the 
embarrassment. But I always refused to be con- 
quered by it, or even to recognize it. “Come in,” 
I said, removing the apron which contrasted so 
flatly with the summer costume before me. “Yes, 
I’m in, as you see, and I’m glad to see you. Come . 
right through to the living room.” 

Generally, I must confess, the second clause of 
this remark was a falsehood; for, ten to one, I had 
a cake in the oven or had only just barely time to 
get dinner before Christopher’s clamorous return 
from.a sketching trip. And summer people, with 
nothing to do but amuse themselves, have no idea 
of the value of time. But yet, in another way, I 
was thoroughly glad. It seemed to me that all 





Mountain Verities 71 


intercourse, all acquaintanceship must be the better 
for the wholesome, homely touch which a kitchen 
can communicate. I felt truer friends with my 
caller for having received her at the back door 
in an apron. 

The social education which my kitchen gave me 
was not complete until it had revealed to me a 
neighborhood custom which I had never suspected, 
but the spontaneous practice of which suddenly 
urged itself on me as a kind of natural law. 

A neighbor had died. He was not a young man 
and he had been ill for some time; so that the 
shock was not great. Nevertheless, every death is 
a shock, and something must be done about it. The 
year before, my impulse would have carried me 
into the flower garden and thence to the shadowed 
door where I would have left my fragrant tribute 
of sympathy without asking or expecting to see one 
of the family. But this year, to my surprise, and 
somewhat to my disgust, my sorrowing thoughts 
turned not to the garden but to the kitchen, and, 
instead of wanting to pick flowers, I found myself 
irresistibly prompted to make a loaf of brown 
bread. How absurd! how even offensive! I took 
myself to task for an obsession which was carrying 
me beyond the bounds of common sense. What 
should a stricken household, in the first throes of 


72 Mountain Verities 


bereavement, care about brown bread? Almost at 
once the answer came, marching sturdily out of 
those fastnesses of life and reality to which, since 
the war, I seemed to have retreated: “Care? 
Why, everything! ‘They must eat; they have 
flocks of relatives coming to them and many things 
to do. What can they care about taking the time 
to cook, if you please? Just bake your bread and 
carry it over and see if they don’t care.” 

Two hours later, I went down the road with my 
warm, fragrant loaf inmy hand. There was some- 
thing about its mere presence that reassured me 
so utterly that instead of knocking at the front 
door, I slipped around to the kitchen and there, 
without knocking at all, lifted the latch and went 
in. 

The widow was washing dishes. Her face was 
pale and her eyes were heavy and red, but she had 
herself in hand. Instinctively I understood that 
her kitchen was steadying her. One neighbor was 
mopping the floor, and in the adjoining room I 
could hear the subdued voices of others at work. 
On the kitchen table stood a pan of baked beans, 
an apple pie, a dish of scalloped potatoes, a loaf 
of chocolate cake. Neighbors had brought them 
and left them, even as I was about to contribute 
my loaf of bread. How glad I was of the impulse 


Mountain Verities 73 


which had prompted me to play my rightful part! 
I set my loaf silently down on the table, and 
never had any tribute of flowers or written or 
spoken words done so much for me to express a 
fullness of sympathy. When I went home, I 
started another loaf and a pan of biscuits. 

It now seems to me, as I meditate on them, that 
these neighborly customs and impulses are very 
deep. They spring from the heart of life where 
that which is common is that which is most true 
and beautiful. uman aspiration must rise ever 
higher and higher, but the sap which nourishes the 
sun-kissed leaves must come from the buried roots. 
They are all one—roots and leaves, depths and 
heights: that is the way to state it. And only those 
parts of the tree do not matter that thrust them- 
selves out wantonly and have to be pruned off. 
No gardener was ever yet known to prune roots. 

That is the great reason why, when trouble 
comics, Common ministrations are best, common 
succor along basic lines. There is a wise tender- 
ness about them which woos the stricken heart to 
“go through the motions of life,” to mark time 
bravely until the shock is over and the march can 
be resumed. Beans and potatoes and brown 
bread: yes, there is an eloquent help in them be- 
yond the scope of flowers and words, 


IX 


UT, much as I owed to my neighbors in the 
way of counsel and stimulus, there was one 
point at which, before the summer was over, 

I found them altogether too stimulating; and the 
fact proved that I had not wholly lost my old 
reluctances. Sincerely as I loved to work in the 
kitchen, [ still “‘drew the line.” ‘The development 
might have given me food for reflection concern- 
ing the negative aspect of the afore-mentioned 
point of view if I had not preferred to think about 
it as little as possible. ‘The truth was that my 
neighbors’ passion for preserving (“‘canning” 
they undiscriminatingly called it) filled me with 
a dismay which acknowledged the lurking presence 
of a threat. 

The menace made itself felt obscurely, even in- 
nocently. Groups of women began to pass the 
house with pails in their hands, going up the hill 
road after wild strawberries. “Then by and by 
they came down again, their tired shoulders sag- 


ging. What a lot of work! ‘They had walked 
74 


Mountain Verities 75 


miles and had been out for hours in the hot June 
meadows, stooping and gathering. Now they 
were on their weary way home. To rest? Not 
at all. ‘They must hull all those berries and put 
them up before they lost their freshness. Hun- 
dreds and thousands and millions of berries to 
be hulled and put up. Where had they found the 
courage for such an exhausting day? 

Courage, however, was, disconcertingly, not the 
quality which looked forth from their tired eyes 
when, reluctantly but irresistibly impelled, I hailed 
them across the fence. Rather, it was contented 
enthusiasm which responded to me. 

“Yes, we've had real good luck. Ten quarts 
apiece, we reckon. How many have you put up?” 

I tried to be careless when I answered, “None.” 
I even essayed to convey in my tone a subtle and 
inoffensive suggestion of superiority. For I 
honestly thought it was not worth while to work so 
hard for a few jars of sweets. But my success was 
not signal. To my annoyance there was a note of 
apology in my voice. 

“Oh, well! there’s plenty of berries left,’ the 
women reassured me. 

Then they nodded and smiled and passed on, 
leaving me a prey to a kind of panic. ‘“‘No! no! 


76 Mountain Verities 


I will not, I won't!” I sternly confronted the imp 
they had raised, and hurried into the house. 

Strawberries lasted a long time that year. For 
two or three weeks the groups of women continued 
to parade their disquieting pails up and down the 
hill and I continued to chant my refrain of, “I will 
not, I won't.” I hid in the house when I saw them 
coming, being both afraid and ashamed to en- 
counter them. It was a curious psychological 
situation; I had never known anything like it. 
Finally, one day, I overheard a passing remark to 
the effect that the strawberry season was about 
over, and then my refrain changed suddenly to a 
relieved, ‘Hurrah!’ I emerged from the house 
and once more faced the world. 

My relief was short-sighted however, and that 
I very soon perceived. For strawberries only 
usher in the canning season. Swift on their heels 
come raspberries, blueberries, blackberries, to say 
nothing of all the garden fruits and vegetables. 
Two or three days after I had learned that nothing 
could now oblige—or even permit—me to put up 
wild strawberries, I unsuspectingly went to Mrs. 
Wood’s to get some eggs and found her dealing 
with a great basket of greens of some sort, wash- 
ing and washing (as only greens have to be 


Mountain Verities a7 


washed) and sorting and scalding and packing into 
glass jars. 

‘What in the world are you doing?” I asked 
with a sinking heart—though of course I knew, 
and was sorry I had come, and wondered if I 
could not get away before I had to hear and think 
too much about it. 

‘Putting up beet greens,’ she answered, turn- 
ing weary and flushed from her arduous task. 
‘Have you put up yours yet? ‘There’s nothing 
one relishes quite so much in mid-winter, we think. 
If you haven’t enough to spare in your garden, we 
can let you have some of ours.” 

“Oh, thank you, no!” I replied hastily, backing 
into the doorway. “To tell the truth, I had not 
expected to put up any vegetables. They are sucha 
lot of work, and one can buy them all at the store.”’ 

‘Y-e-e-s,”” answered Mrs. Wood, trying politely 
to meet me on my quite untenable ground; “but 
they aren't nearly so good, do you think? And 
they're expensive nowadays. I like canning,” she 
added, coming to the real point with a flash of 
enthusiasm which I recognized but nevertheless 
found incredible. 

“Well, I don’t!” I said flatly, and turned and 
fled, leaving my egg basket unfilled. 

‘What's the matter?” asked Christopher at the 


b] 


78 Mountain Verities 


supper table that night. ‘‘Won’t the bread rise? 
Or has the cream turned sour ?”’ 

‘No; yes,” I answered forlornly, rousing my- 
self from the revery into which I had fallen. ““The 
bread and cream are all right, but—well, I don’t 
know that I want to tell you. I’m a little afraid 
to put it into words. What is your experience? 
Have you found that it’s safer to recognize perils 
or to ignore them?” 

‘On the whole, to recognize them,” he replied 
after due consideration. ‘Sometimes perils can’t 
stand statement any more than ghosts can stand the 
dawn.” 

‘But not all perils are ghosts, worse luck!” I 
lamented. 

‘‘Aren’t they? I don’t know. To tell the truth, 
I hadn’t thought about it before. I’m not so sure 
that they aren’t. At any rate, the point is interest- 
ing, and I should think it might always be worth 
while to give them the benefit of the doubt.” 

“Well,” I continued, ‘‘TVll hint at the trouble. 
All our neighbors are madly preserving everything 
they can lay their hands on. Fruit, vegetables, 
eggs, meat. I daresay, they’re putting up holly. 
hocks and nasturtiums too, but so far I haven't 
happened to drop in on that particular process.” 


Mountain Verities 79 


Christopher was silent a minute. His eyes 
smiled and sparkled as they dwelt on me. 

“And you a pacifist!” he finally commented. 

The remark was so unexpected that I had to be 
silent in my turn for more than a minute. What 
could he mean? I groped. 

‘You've courage enough for some things,” he 
assisted me. 

“Ah!” I understood and I smiled back at him. 
“That was an amazingly skillful jump, Christo- 
pher. You mean that, having resisted public opin- 
ion for several years in an important matter, I 
ought to be able to resist it now in a trivial affair. 
But maybe that’s just one of the reasons for my 
weakness. I’ve used up all my resistance. I never 
enjoyed it one bit, you know. I hated being out 
of the current, aloof from the popular heart.” 

‘T know.” 

The amusement in Christopher’s eyes turned to 
a look of pure sympathy. He understood. 

“Well,” he continued after another pause, ‘‘that 
being so, why don’t you allow yourself the luxury 
of yielding to the mob spirit now, letting yourself 
be carried away?” 

‘And spend all the rest of the summer toiling 
and moiling!” I protested on a note of sheer de- 
spair. “Christopher, have you any idea what hard 


80 Mountain Verities 


work it is? I don’t want to, oh! I don’t want to. 
The prospect is overwhelming.” 

‘Then don’t do it.” 

With admirable common sense and decision, 
Christopher settled the matter. 

It was he, however, who unsettled it, without in 
the least meaning to do so, that very afternoon. 
As soon as the shadows began to lengthen, he left 
the studio, took his hoe, and went out into the 
garden to cultivate the corn. I saw him from the 
side piazza where I was restlessly reading a book, 
and at once my uneasy thoughts started up some- 
what in this vein: 

‘Christopher has worked hard over the garden 
this year. That’s because it’s bigger than usual. 
I wish it weren’t. We can’t possibly eat all the 
vegetables. It’s a thousand pities that any of his 
labor should be thrown away. Oh, dear! oh, 
dear! I wonder if we couldn’t give some vege- 
tables to the neighbors. We've carried so many 
baskets to cottagers that I’m ashamed to burden 
them further. Yes, Mrs. Mann’s garden isn’t so 
very big. I'll take her some beans this minute.”’ 

‘““Heywotchadoon?” said Christopher mildly 
when I appeared in the garden with a basket. 

‘‘Going to take some beans to Mrs. Mann,” I 
answered carelessly. 


Mountain Verities SI 


“Why, she’s got beans herself.” 

Christopher was puzzled. He leaned on his 
hoe and pushed his hat back from his forehead 
and looked at me. 

“Well, probably not such ae beans as yours. 
And, anyway 

But ; broke off. I had been just on the point of 
saying, “anyway, she can put them up.” 

She certainly could, if she had not already done 
it! When I appeared in her kitchen doorway, a 
by-this-time familiar atmosphere of hard work 
and confusion warned me that my old peril was 
again in the air, and when I[ entered, I saw rows 
of bean-filled glass jars reposing on their sides on 
the kitchen table. 

‘See my canned beans!’ Mrs. Mann pro- 
claimed before she had had time to notice the con- 
tents of my basket. “Don’t they look nice? I’ve 
just finished them. They’ve taken me pretty much 
all day. Oh! you’ve brought me some more. 
Well, well! isn’t that kind in you? Thank you. 
I—I—well, you see, I’ve used up most all my 
jars. But it surely is kind in you. Thank you. I 
—I—won’t you have a chair?” 

I made her take those superfluous beans. I 
would have left them behind me if I had had to 
dump them into the pig pen. And, for a week or 





82 Mountain Verities 


ten days thereafter, I made constant, feverish 
efforts to work off our garden’s surplus on our em- 
barrassed neighbors and surfeited village friends. 
The spontaneity of the welcome with which I was 
wont to be received at kitchen doorways fell off 
noticeably. 

Meantime, my attempted salvation was every- 
where my destruction. Not a kitchen doorway but 
exuded steam from merrily bubbling boilers; not 
a kitchen table but proudly bore its burden of glass 
jars. Mine was the only kitchen in town which 
was not pervaded with the canning stir. How idle 
and empty it looked when I returned to it! Too 
loyal to reproach me openly, it yet began to make 
me aware of a suppressed unhappiness of thwarted 
ambition. — 

The whole experience was as fine an example 
of the power of the mob spirit as I have ever en- 
countered. It made me understand history and 
human nature as never before. 

My capitulation was sudden and yet not unpre- 
meditated. My subconscious self timed it for a 
certain day when Christopher was to be absent 
with a fellow painter. There were all sorts of - 
reasons for this—so many that I will leave them 
to the imagination of the sympathetic reader. I 
could not bear to be applauded or laughed at or 


Mountain Verities 83 


helped or neglected or, in short, noticed in any 
way. A crisis was upon me. I must deal with it 
single-handed. 

It is not often that I am glad to see Christo- 
pher’s back disappearing in the distance. In fact, 
I think I had never, until that morning, experienced 
the peculiar sensation of relief. [ did not like it 
and turned away from it to the task that con- 
fronted me. Grimly I rolled my sleeves to the 
shoulder and set my teeth. 

Corn. Yes, it was even with that most exacting 
and difficult vegetable that I had elected to begin. 
When one makes an unwilling capitulation, there 
is a certain defiant satisfaction in making it as com- 
pletely as possible. More or less evasively, I had 
already collected the essential implements. From 
the hardware shop I[ had acquired a tall can with 
a rack in the bottom, and I had allowed a neighbor 
to lend me a card of directions of the cold pack 
method. Casually, I had mentioned in my last 
grocery order that “I might as well have a dozen 
preserving jars.’ Everything was in readiness. 
The kitchen, awaking to the reality of the oppor- 
tunity, tingled with expectation. 

But, for once, my response was not whole- 
hearted, and that, I suppose, was the great reason 
why I found the ensuing day so desperately trying. 


84 Mountain Verities 


If I had wanted to put up that corn! But I did 
not want to. 

As I look back on the morning, however, I 
realize how very much harder it might easily have 
been, and I am grateful to some domestic good 
angel who flew to my rescue and prevented me 
from making quite all the mistakes I had in mind. 
For instance, my first impulse was to begin at what 
seemed the obvious beginning, namely, the corn 
itself; and I was already half out the kitchen door- 
way, with a basket in my hand, when something 
warned me that I was going to need a great deal of 
hot water, and I had better set the preserving can | 
and all the kettles to heat. Yet again, when I had 
once more started for the garden, I paused and 
looked doubtfully at my basket. Had I not heard 
someone say that it took several ears of corn to 
fill a quart jar? Perhaps I had better provide 
myself with a larger receptacle. 

If it had not been for these two precautions, I 
should have lost many precious minutes of time. 
As it was, the floods of hot water which I stood 
in need of transcended all my calculations, and the 
largest basket I could find proved absurdly in- 
adequate. Many and many a trip I made between 
the sink and the stove and between the garden and 
the refuse heap where I piled discarded corn husks 


Mountain Verities 85 


into a small mountain. And still I never had hot 
water or corn enough. 

It is not my intention here to enumerate all the 
details of the corn canning process. Probably 
most of my readers are entirely familiar with them, 
and anyway this is not a kitchen manual. But of 
course it was precisely the details, crowding one 
on another, that hounded and harassed me until 
I felt like a juggler trying to keep a dozen balls 
in the air. The tea-kettlesful of water sufficed to 
scald the corn, but there was not enough left over 
to flood the jars. ‘The jars themselves I re- 
membered to sink in the warm water and let them 
come gradually to a boil; but the covers and 
rubbers I wholly forgot until I had instant need of 
them, and there they were in a state of nature, 
untempered and unsterilized. Instant need: that 
was the trouble. I hate to hurry, and this morning 
J did nothing but hurry faster and faster. ‘Oh! 
it isn’t worth while, it isn’t worth while!” I 
moaned to myself as I sped across the kitchen floor, 
as I struggled with monstrous seas of hot water, as 
I scraped and packed and deluged. 

The dinner hour came and passed, and I had 
neither time nor stove space to prepare a meal. I 
might have eaten some scalded corn, to be sure; 
but just then I loathed corn and, anyway, I could 


86 Mountain Verities 


not spare a kernel from those insatiable jars. As 
it was, I had twice to leave a jar unfilled and dash 
out to the garden after a fresh basketful, and hull 
and scald and scrape all over again. If Christo- 
pher had been there, he would have said, “Oh, 
wurra-wurra!’”? But, no, I am mistaken; in the 
light of later events, I am inclined to think that 
Christopher would have said something much 
stronger. Three o’clock struck before I had the 
last jar filled and submerged in boiling water. 

Done! I had done it. The kitchen chairs were 
all spattered with drops of water and kernels of 
corn and laden with wet dish towels, but I dropped 
down in the nearest of them and let my hands fall 
in my lap. In Christopher’s sympathetic presence, 
I should doubtless have wept; but, being alone, I 
gave myself over to a survey of my once orderly 
kitchen. 

In spite of the fact that I had never seemed to 
have water and corn enough, there was now water 
and corn everywhere—on the floor, on the table, 
on all the chairs, on the walls and the windowsills. 
There was every dish towel we had in the house. 
‘There were kettles and spoons and knives and 
forks and plates. There were piles of corn husks 
and strings of corn silk. There were beetles and 
crickets which had been carried in under the leaves 


Mountain Verities 87, 


and which were now forlornly exploring the lino- 
leum. Altogether, a more completely demoralized 
kitchen could hardly be imagined. And, with a 
perverse doubling of circumstance on itself, not all 
the water at large in the room was sufficient to 
make me a cup of tea. I abandoned the place, 
turned my back on it, and, going upstairs to my 
room, fell in a heap on the bed. 

When Christopher came back, he laughed. Oh! 
he laughed. I lay and listened, and vacillated be- 
tween responsive amusement and irritation and a 
renewed desire to weep. 

‘Gee whiz! it got you, didn’t it?” he said, hunt- 
ing me up at last and perching on the edge of the 
bed, his eyes shining with appreciation. ‘And no 
halfway measures. The kitchen looks as if some- 
one had been bombing a corn field in it.”’ 

‘Doesn't it?’ I groaned. “And the thing’s not 
over yet, either. In half an hour the corn will be 
done and the jars will have to come out of the 
water and have their covers snapped. I don’t 
know how in the world I’m going to get them out. 
You see, they’re completely immersed.” 

“Well, leave that to me,” said Christopher, 
promptly taking over the burden as is his comfort- 
ing wont. ‘“T’ll manage it somehow. I'll get sup- 
per too. You must be about played out.” 


88 Mountain Verities 


‘Played! I protested. ‘I’ve never done any- 
thing much less like play in my life.” 

Christopher is deft and resourceful, but the re- 
moval of those jars of corn from their seething 
cauldron gave him serious pause. In order to 
make quite sure of the absolute immersion on 
which the directions insisted, I had sunk them in 
steaming depths upon depths. When we lifted the 
cover and peered in, we could not see them at all. 

‘‘Suppose we bale out a little first,’’ Christopher 
suggested presently. ‘“Then we can locate them.” 

And he went to work with a dipper and pail. 

‘Tt says: keep them well covered,” I remarked 
uneasily from his elbow; “‘and snap them instantly 
on taking them out. They ought to come one ata 
time, I suppose. . . . Oh, Christopher, look out! 
You'll scald yourself.” 

I fell back hastily to give him room, for he had 
made a pounce with one of my long-suffering dish 
towels, and, seizing a jar by the neck, had ex- 
tracted it. 

‘Here goes, then!” he cried, bearing his prize 
across the room, depositing it on the kitchen table 
and snapping down the wire that held its cover in 
place. ‘‘No, ?’m not burned, not a bit. I'll go 
back and get another. But first I want to look at 
this one. I say, aren’t you proud? I am for you. 


Mountain Verities 89 


It looks absolutely professional. Golly! what a 
success !”” 

Yes, I was proud. The unexpected sensation 
came welling up from within me in a manner which 
I found both refreshing and disheartening. Proud: 
after all my rebellion and protest, my hard, hard 
work, my unutterable fatigue! But how could I 
resist the appeal of that sleek dripping jar with its 
pale yellow kernels so close-packed within, giving 
every evidence of unqualified success? I did not 
want to rejoice in it, but I could not help myself. 
Lifting it in the dish towel, I turned it around and 
around, lost in impotent admiration. My handi- 
work! A success! 

Christopher’s voice recalled me. He had re- 
turned to the stove with the intention of removing 
another jar, but stood arrested by some uncer- 
tainty. 

‘T say, come here,” he said (and I came with a 
rush). ‘You see, the removal of that jar lowered 
the level of the water, so that all the other jars: 
have now got their heads out. Do you suppose it 
makes any difference?” 

I was appalled. The directions had made a 
great point of insisting that the jars be completely 
immersed until the instant before they were 


90 Mountain Verities 


snapped. And here they were all rearing their 
heads into the baleful air. 

“Oh, hurry, hurry!” I cried. ‘“‘Get them out 
quick. I'll help.” 

The confusion of the morning was nothing to 
the distraction of the next two or three minutes 
during which Christopher and I ran back and forth 
across the kitchen floor. We worked so fast that 
we got in each other’s way, and one jar fell off 
the table and broke. More water and corn were 
contributed to the kitchen floor. Christopher 
swore softly and continually. As for me, I was 
speechless with haste and dismay. 

‘Oh! do you suppose they’re all right?” I asked, 
catching my breath at last when the crisis was over 
and all the jars stood sealed on the kitchen table. 

“‘Isn’t there any way we can test them?” in- 
quired Christopher. 

“Well,” I answered, with an ominous reluctance, 
falling back on my oft-repeated formula, “‘the di- 
rections say they should be inverted and examined 
for leaks.” 

“Bubbles indicate leaks, I suppose,” supple- 
mented Christopher. 

He was always prompter and braver than I. 
While I cravenly hesitated, he suited his action to 
my word and inverted one of the jars. 


Mountain Verities OI 


Alas! I had known it would be so, and therefore 
I had hesitated. As we bent and peered anxiously, 
a perfect geyser of bubbles rushed up along the 
inside of the jar. 

Of course we know now, and all my intelligent 
readers know, that they were steam bubbles and 
that they always play about the interior of newly 
sealed jars; but at the time we were too inex- 
perienced and too flurried to realize the innocence 
of the phenomenon. Under the peculiar circum- 
stances it looked utterly damnable to us, and we 
gazed at each other aghast. 

“Well,” said Christopher doggedly in a 
minute—he set his lips and his jaw in a way that 
I understood and respected—‘what next? What 
else do your old directions say? If there are 
leaks ts 

“Remove the tops and repeat the process,’ ” 
I quoted wretchedly. 

Is there anything in the world quite like the sang 
froid of recipes? Repeat the process! As if it 
were a mere matter of minutes and casual concern. 
I saw Christopher glance at the clock, evidently 
computing the number of hours the process had 
already cost me, and then cast his eye about the 
ravaged kitchen. But he did not hesitate. With 
his jaw set firmer than ever and a dangerous gleam 





92 Mountain Verities 


in his eye, he fell upon the remaining jars (thank 
heaven, one was safe and one was broken!), 
wrenched their covers from them, set more water 
to boil (oh, more water!), and presently had “‘the 
process” in full swing again. With this dazzling 
improvement upon my method, that now every sub- 
merged jar was secured by a loop of twine which 
hung over the side of the can. 

Common sense came to our rescue in time to pre- 
vent us from repeating the entire process. The 
point was, as Christopher submitted—revived and 
cheered by the frugal meal which we managed to 
prepare—the point was simply to make sure that 
the air was expelled. So when the last drop of tea 
and the last cigarette puff had done their benef- 
cent work, we lifted the jars, one by one, by their 
strings and snapped their covers tight. 

‘‘No,” said Christopher peremptorily, when he 
saw me about to invert a jar and examine it. 

I thought he was merely so perfectly sure of suc- 
cess this time that he did not want to indulge in the 
waste of a test; but he confessed to me later— 
much later—that the innocent nature of the steam 
bubbles had been so convincingly borne in upon 
him while he was eating his supper that he could 
not bear to face their recurrence and prove to him- 


Mountain Verities 93 


self that our whole repetition of process had been 
unnecessary. 

With one accord, we turned our backs on the 
kitchen, leaving it just as it was, and went out into 
the cool summer dusk. 

“You're entirely right,” said Christopher there, 
after a long, restful silence. “The thing’s not 
worth while. We won't do it again. Next year 
we'll have a small hand-to-mouth garden and buy 
our winter vegetables canned.” 


X 


T is illustrative of the hold my kitchen had 
taken on me that I have devoted all these 
pages and chapters exclusively to it. When, 

as a matter of fact, its interest was only one among 
the many that filled the days and weeks of our first 
genuine country life. 

Too many. Yes, that was the unexpected 
trouble. And Christopher had his effrontery with 
him when he lectured me on my slavery to the 
kitchen! How about his to the orchard, the gar- 
den, the lawn, the Ford, the woodshed, the fences, 
the neighbors’ cows and hens? He had come into 
the country to paint, and at first, except in fits and 
starts, he was not doing it. 

From the early days of our return there was 
something about him that caused me a vague appre- 
hension. I did not know what it was: a new ex- 
pression, a surprising tendency to get up early in 
the morning and mend fences, a knowing way of in- 
vestigating the bark of apple trees. I did not think 


94 


Mountain Verities 95 


much about it, until a neighbor came in to see us 
one evening and brought it out into the open. 

We were sitting in the orchard, and Christopher 
was lost in a study of the pattern the gnarled 
boughs made against the sunset sky. I knew from 
his expression—familiar enough this time—that 
the creative mood was hovering. 

‘Nice old picturesque place!” he remarked as 
we welcomed our neighbor and sat down again. 
“I think maybe tomorrow [’ll have a try at it with 
my brushes.” 

‘‘Picturesque—well, yes,” the neighbor assented 
politely, but with a note of demur. ‘It’s been 
badly neglected, however, and that’s rather a 
shame, don’t you think? When I saw you out 
here this evening I thought perhaps you were look- 
ing it over with a view to saving it.” 

There was a silence. I saw the new look creep 
back into Christopher’s face, and I think he must 
have felt it because he gave me a curious glance— 
dismayed and defiant and apologetic. For a full 
minute the balance hung. Then he squared his 
shoulders and thrust his hands in his pockets. 

‘Tell me about it,” he said challengingly to the 
neighbor. 

In another five minutes I was left sitting alone 
in the grass while the neighbor and Christopher 


96 Mountain Verities 


went the rounds of the orchard. Fragments of 
sentences came back to me, concerning dry rot, 
scales and borers, methods of pruning and spray- 
ing, the crying need for fertilization. I was 
amazed at my husband’s facility with the unknown 
jargon. When he returned his face was aglow, 
swept clear of its recent pensiveness, and he cried 
eagerly: 

‘T’ve learned such a lot! Why, I had no idea. 
We've come just in time to save the orchard. I’m 


going to send for some books and tools tomorrow, 
and a 


He broke off suddenly, and I did not have to 
ask what was the matter. 

Yet the fatal process was so gradual that, for 
some time, we were both able to keep our mis- 
givings in our subconsciousness, where they caused 
us only occasional, transient difficulties in meeting 
each other’s eyes when a new apple catalogue ap- 
peared in our mail box. We even congratulated 
ourselves on the privilege of devoting our leisuré 
time to such a wholesome pursuit as the reclaiming 
of an old orchard. I emulated my husband’s zeal 
by applying myself to the flower beds, weeding and 
transplanting and rearranging. Our cheeks and 
hands grew brown, the city folds disappeared from 
our clothes, and our appetites were appalling. 





Mountain Verities 97 


“Christopher,” I said one evening when we had 
been home a month or six weeks, ‘“‘did I see you 
starting out with your sketch box this afternoon?” 

Christopher stirred uneasily. 

“Yes, you did,” he replied in a troubled voice. 
‘The sky was stunning, and I was just in the mood. 
But [ got no farther than the studio door, for the 
man came with the asparagus roots and I had to 
stop and attend to him. ‘Then he said that the 
plants ought to go in the ground at once. So I 
spent the rest of the day in the garden.” 

‘Asparagus ?” I echoed blankly. 

‘Why, yes,” answered Christopher with another 
of his curious mingled glances. ‘‘Of course if you 
live in the country, it’s a foregone conclusion that 
you must have a garden; and I| thought I might as 
well order the asparagus along with the new apple 
erces,” 

‘‘New apple trees?” I echoed again. “I didn’t 
know—but, well, yes, of course, the orchard needs 
them. Dear me! Never mind. ALll> right. 
Christopher, tell me, would you plant tulips or 
crocuses in that bed? And do you think you could 
find time to prune the lilac bush?” 

Several weeks elapsed before we again men- 
tioned the subject of painting, but by that time our 


98 Mountain Verities 


misgivings had left our subconsciousness and were 
causing us real concern. 

‘T think the trouble is,” said Christopher with 
characteristic hopefulness, “that we aren’t yet 
fitted into our new environment. Isn’t it perhaps 
natural that we should have to devote all our time 
to our surroundings while we are growing accus- 
tomed to them?” 

‘‘Perhaps,” I assented doubtfully; “but I am 
beginning to suspect that this place has a vigorous 
will of its own and that a great deal depends on the 
way we start in with it.” 

‘“Well,”’ sighed Christopher, stretching himself 
out in the grass, then instantly getting up to mark 
a bough that needed pruning, “I must say I like it. 
Perhaps that’s the trouble. There’s something 
primitive in me that responds to all this outdoor 
work. It’s fine, it’s exhilarating.” 

He laid his hand in a comradely fashion on the 
rough gray trunk near him. 

But of course it is axiomatic that there is no 
such jealous mistress as Art, and it was not long 
before conflict caused an occasional line to appear 
between Christopher’s eyes. When that line was 
there he had less than usual to say about the joys 
of country life. 

It was not only the place that made such surpris- 


Mountain Verities 99 


ing demands upon us—our own innocent-looking 
five or six acres; the whole community presently 
began putting in social claims that bewildered us. 
“But I have no voice to speak of!’ Christopher 
protested when he was asked to sing in the church 
choir; and, ‘“Why, but I’m a landscape painter!” 
when it was suggested that he help organize a 
Society of Natural Science. As for me, I was put 
to it to explain without giving offence that I had 
no qualifications for teaching a Sunday School class 
or reading a paper in the Woman’s Missionary 
Meeting. The perplexity with which our excuses 
were received was equal to that with which they 
were proffered; and, after pondering and discuss- 
ing the situation for awhile, we came to the con- 
clusion that specialization, taken for granted in the 
city, is almost unknown in the country. 

“You remember the story of the man who, being 
asked whether he could play the violin, replied that 
he didn’t know, he had never tried. Well,’ said 
Christopher, “I see now that he came from a 
country village and that his answer wasn’t absurd 
but entirely reasonable. I certainly didn’t know, 
two months ago, that I could do a plumber’s job 
or write an acceptable paper on Darwinism, 
but . . .’ He made a comprehensive and com- 
placent gesture. 


100 Mountain Verities 


“See me jump!” I murmured, getting back at 
him the comment with which he has always been 
wont to greet my own occasional bursts of self- 
gratulation. 

“Well,” he repeated, laughing but holding his 
ground, “‘it is a satisfaction to find that one can do 
more than two or three things; one feels just so 
much more of a man for every new accomplish- 
ment. I see now that life in the city tends to be 
narrow and partial and superficial, whereas life in 
the country is as broad and deep as humanity itself. 
Heaven knows I’m not pious,” he went on reflec- 
tively, “‘and never supposed I could tolerate being 
considered so; but I really think I'll be tickled to 
death if they maké me a deacon of the church. 

‘Gee! what a joke!” he concluded soberly. 

It was a joke. As the weeks went by and it be- 
came more and more generally understood that we 
were no longer “‘city people” but had come to cast 
in our lot with the country folk for good and all, 
we found ourselves filling roles of which we had 
never dreamed before. Christopher was no longer 
a simple painter but was also a deacon, a darky 
minstrel (at a local “show’’), a scientist, a 
plumber, a carpenter, a farmer, a mechanic. And - 
I was an equal number of unprecedented things. 

‘‘T shan’t ever need any reincarnations,”’ Chris- 


Mountain Verities IOI 


topher laughed one day. ‘‘I’m living eight or nine 
lives at once, here and now.” 

But the problem presented by the difficulty of 
fitting all these new lives into the same old familiar 
twenty-four hours was not a joke, and we finally 
found that we should have to tackle it seriously. 
Otherwise, we might as well throw away our paint 
tubes and empty our ink bottle. 

First, I remember, we tried philosophy; and, by 
dint of much reading of Marcus Aurelius, sought 
to establish an impregnable inner control, so that, 
no matter how much our bodies might be inter- 
rupted, our minds should continue serenely on their 
way. 

While this method prevailed, Christopher would 
start for his studio as early as possible in the 
morning and IJ would likewise start for my desk, 
both of us submitting patiently to the demands of 
our environment by the way. Arrived and estab- 
lished, we would work for some fifteen or twenty 
minutes, when I would glance from my window 
and hastily call across to the studio: “Christopher! 
Christopher! There’s that black horse in the 
garden again. Hle’s eating the peas.” Then 
Christopher would sally forth and put an end to 
this neighborly call. My turn would come next. 
Absorbed in a paper on the nature of the Catholic 


102 Mountain Verities 


Mass, I would hear a loud ringing of bells and 
realize that my only chance to buy fish for dinner 
was at the gate. So then, hugging the thread of 
my thought, I would emerge from the house. 
‘Reality is ineffable,” I would go chanting to 
myself. “It is more nearly approached by sym- 
bols than—no, not cod, we had cod last week— 
how much is your halibut ?” 

This business safely over, again a brief pause 
would favor us, broken by the arrival of a tramp 
or peddler, neither applicant to be neglected ac- 
cording to the kindly laws of country etiquette. 
The tramp I would hand over to Christopher, the 
peddler I would interview myself, conscientiously 
buying shoe-strings which I did not need. By 
eleven o'clock the horse would be back in the 
garden, a neighbor’s child would have come with a 
‘soap order” list, two summer boarders would 
have walked out from the village and would be 
hanging over the fence, distractingly praising the 
flowers, the telephone would have rung six times, a 
neighbor’s cat would have caught one of our 
robins (we have no cat of our own on purpose to 
safeguard the birds), a neighbor’s kitten would 
have fallen into our rain-barrel, another neighbor’s 
child would have come to borrow the ice-cream 
freezer and her father the wheelbarrow, and 


Mountain Verities 103 


Christopher would have remembered that he had 
forgotten to water his transplanted seedlings. Oh, 
the unraveled mysteries of the Catholic Mass! 
And, oh, the rainbow hues of Christopher’s face 
on which his frequently and hastily abandoned 
brush had revenged itself by depositing most of its 
paint! 

“Christopher,” I said forlornly one evening, as 
we sat in the orchard in a mercifully deepening 
dusk which prevented the counting of superfluous 
suckers on the apple trees, ‘I’m afraid we shall 
have to give up and go back to the city.” 

Christopher gave a great start of dismay. 

‘With those Northern Spies just beginning to 
bear again! With the asparagus bed nicely 
started! With my picture of West Mountain un- 
finished! What are you thinking about?” 

‘The unfinished picture of course,” I replied. 
“You can’t work on it tomorrow because you’ve 
got to meet the Convention delegates and set up the 
stereopticon. And the next day a man’s coming 
to consult you on some County Improvement busi- 
ness. And the day after that, the County Agent’s 
going to inspect the orchard. And—oh, Christo- 
pher! doesn’t a city apartment sound heavenly 
quiet to you?” 

“No,” replied Christopher resolutely, sitting up 


104 Mountain Verities 


in the grass and turning his back on a tent worms’ 
nest which the rising moon had just revealed to 
him. ‘‘It sounds hideous, and I refuse to think 
about it. I tell you what we'll do. We'll chuck 
Marcus Aurelius, and I'll bind myself by a solemn 
vow to paint, say, from nine to one every morning. 
Then Ill have to do it or break my word. ‘That 
will give me a good solid deaconly reason to 
oppose to % 

“Everything!” I broke in joyfully. ‘To the 
visits of the horse, to the arrival of the potato 
bug, to the burning down of the house, to the fall- 
ing of the heavens. Christopher, it’s a good idea. 
I wonder we never tried it before.” 

“Well,” sighed Christopher, “‘it’s a schedule, 
and I’ve always declared I wouldn’t live by a 
schedule. But of course that was in the simple, 
free life of the city. Here in the distracting coun- 
try, | seem driven to it.” 

This is our present method: the schedule. We 
are so rigid about it that we have even gone so far 
as to send a matutinal church committee empty 
away from our unresponsive gate. But I do not 
yet feel safe. ‘here is always too much hovering 
threat in the air: from the weedy garden, the im- 
minent potato bug and rose beetle, the clanging 





Mountain Verities 105 


meat wagon, and the thousand and one interests 
of the day. | 

One thing is perfectly certain: the leisure of a 
country life has been over-estimated. 


XI 


HILE I am on the subject of interruptions 

I wonder if I dare tackle a delicate, 

dificult theme which I am sure many 

country residents will thank me for opening up. It 

is that of the unannounced arrival of motor 
tourists. 

But immediately my heart fails me, for it is one 
of the joys of living in a beautiful valley that, 
sooner or later, one may expect all one’s friends 
to stop at one’s gate. And not for anything would 
I discourage them. 

If they would only let one know! That is the 
unique burden, the sum and substance of my com- 
plaint. Surely there are post offices and telegraph 
stations everywhere, surely the long distance tele- 
phone is ubiquitous. 

I do not know what there is about the process 
of motoring that makes people so irresponsible. 
Is it just the uncertainty of the road, the chance of 
tire or engine trouble? Or is the motor tourist 
in a thoroughly care-free holiday mood and does 

106 


Mountain Verities 107 


he take it for granted that everyone else is the 
same? 

The people who come to see us certainly never 
dream that we are ever busy, that we have possible 
engagements, that there is any danger of failing 
to find us on our front doorstep waiting for them. 
And so we miss many calls which we might just as 
well as not have been at home to receive, and many 
others find us in a state where we cannot do justice 
to them. 

I remember one ill-fated day when, having a 
hard and fast engagement with Christopher in the 
afternoon, I nevertheless decided to put up 
tomatoes in the morning. That was a mistake to 
begin with, and I deserved the frenzy of haste and 
fatigue which by twelve o’clock had reduced me to 
a limp but agitated rag reeking with tomato Juice. 
How was I going to get any dinner before the 
afternoon engagement fell due? Well, for- 
tunately, Christopher was a long-suffering angel. 
I would make some tomato soup and let it go at 
that. But, oh, how tired I was! Could I possibly 
take another step across that kitchen floor? 

While I was in the act of filling my last four 
or five jars with tomatoes, I heard a motor horn 
blowing merrily outside the gate, and my heart fell 
into the very bottom of my shoes—a thing that no 


108 Mountain Verities 


decent heart likes to do when its friends are at the 
door. I stayed where I was. Let Christopher go. 
Probably they were his friends, not mine. 

A minute later, Christopher’s voice was heard 
calling me with a note of exaggerated, even des- 
perate enthusiasm: ‘Dear! dear! can you come? 
The Arnolds are here.” 

“But I can’t! Look at me! How can I?” I 
wailed when, strangely failing to make me hear, he 
entered the kitchen. “I’m barely distinguishable 
from a tomato.” 

His glance was not reassuring. 

‘You might take off your apron and wipe your 
face,’ he suggested. “Anyway, really you must 
come. They’ve brought their lunch, and they want 
us to take ours and picnic with them in the orchard. 
They haven't long to stay.” 

The whole episode was so unfortunate that, 
though I began its narration with some zest, I find 
that I have not the heart to pursue it further. 
There were six people, immaculate, unjaded, brim- 
ming with friendliness, ready to give us an hour of 
delightful intercourse, and there was I, unspeakable 
and speechless, a disgraceful sight to behold and so 
tired that I could not even think. Moreover, there 
were my tomatoes still claiming attention, and there 
was no picnic lunch ready, and there was the after- 


Mountain Verities 109 


noon’s engagement looming. “‘Oh, why didn’t, why 
didn’t you let us know?” I lamented. ‘Then I 
wouldn’t have got into all this mess, then I should 
have had things ready for you, then What I 
wanted to add was, “‘then I should have been glad 
to see you,” but I stopped just in time. 

It was the point though, the important reason 
why motor tourists should let people know when 
they mean to drop in on them. It is a. real offense 
to deprive a hostess of her natural joy at receiving 
guests. 

I remember another occasion when some people 
did telephone from a neighboring village just as we 
were about to get into the Ford to keep an engage- 
ment of several days’ standing. ‘Oh, hello!” sang 
Christopher. ‘Is that you? Well, that’s great, 
that’s bully! We—yes—that is, we—I don't 
suppose you could come later in the afternoon, 
could you? No? Well, of course then, all right. 
We shall be mighty glad to see you.” 

‘It’s Uncle John and Aunt Annie,” he said, 
hanging up the receiver and turning to me. 
‘They'll be here in fifteen minutes. I haven’t seen 
them in six years. Of course I had to give them 
the preference.” 

Followed a frantic ten minutes at the telephone, 
trying to get the friends with whom we had our 





110 Mountain Verities 


afternoon engagement, calling everything off, re- 
arranging all our plans. Followed, in another five 
minutes, a call from our relatives so brief that it 
kept and left us gasping. 

‘‘No, we really ought not to get out. You see, 
we want to make Brattleboro this afternoon. We 
simply felt that we couldn’t pass so near without a 
glimpse of you. Well, then, just a minute. What 
a nice old house and what a lovely garden! No, 
we couldn’t think of staying all night. We're 
going on to the White Mountains tomorrow. | 
And really we ought to be on our way. Goodbye. 
So glad to have had this glimpse of you!” 

‘‘But why do you suppose they came at all?” I 
said feebly to Christopher when, after another 
frantic and futile session with the telephone, trying 
to recapture our engagement, we found ourselves 
left with the afternoon on our hands. 

‘Search me!” answered Christopher. ‘“They 
barely looked at us. They were really thinking 
about nothing but Brattleboro. That's mostly 
what motor tourists do think about—their next 
destination and how to get there as soon as 
possible. The people and things they see by the 
way are just side issues.” 

“Well, I think they might have let us know what 
they intended to do,” I voiced my familiar plaint. 


Mountain Verities III 


Take it all in all, motor tourists are the most 
disconcertin, disorganizing element we have in 
our country life, more incalculable than the freak- 
ish Vermont weather, more tantalizing than the 
garden melons and sweet peas. 

It is too bad. For they might be one of our 
greatest blessings. 


XII 


PEAKING of the telephone: 
S There is one room in our old house which, 
from our first occupation, has steadily re- 
fused to conform to any of the normal, conven- 
tional uses of a room. ‘Though it lies between the 
kitchen and dining-room and has an exposure 
which catches the morning sun, it has not fallen in 
with our notion of making a breakfast room of 
it. Neither, in those helpless pre-war days when 
we thought “‘we must have a maid,” did it lend 
itself gracefully to the rdle of maid’s sitting-room. 
There were too many doors in it for the peace 
of mind of “followers.” Probably all people who 
have had experience with old houses know how 
wilful they can be. A refractory room will never 
yield to dictation, but must be let alone on the 
chance that, sooner or later, some suitable role will 
present itself. 
The introduction of the telephone was the cue 
for which our anomalous little apartment waited, 
reserving itself, not obstinately as we had supposed, 


I1I2 


Mountain Verities 113 


but with a fine, single-minded, resolute wisdom 
which might teach a lesson to mutable, grouping hu- 
manity. It knew its own when it saw it, and at once 
its assertion of will became as positive as it had lately 
been negative. We had rather expected to put the 
telephone in a corner of the hall where it could be 
heard in all parts of the house. Our “party line”’ 
has many subscribers, and the business of recog- 
nizing our own particular summons is not simple. 
But, no! though the hall was willing enough, even 
eager, it had no show whatever against the sud- 
denly concentrated volition of the room in the 
rear of the house; and before we knew quite what 
was happening the telephone was installed close 
by the side door that opens out on the little south 
porch. It was not very convenient for us, but it 
was immensely convenient for our neighbors, and 
that was the happy point. 

Only a few of our neighbors have telephones of 
their own. Considering the situation beforehand, 
from the cold, stupid point of view of the city 
apartment dweller, we should probably have pre- 
ferred that they should all be equipped with the 
means of transacting their business in their own 
homes. But that prejudgment would only have 
proved how thoroughly stupid we were. In the 
first place, our particular line meanders across half 


114 Mountain Verities 


a township and is so crowded and voluble that 
patience, patience (and sometimes a quick dash of 
impatience) is needed if one is to get a word in 
edgewise. I frequently spend half an hour wait- 
ing for a chance to order a yeast cake from the 
village store. One neighbor in particular flies to 
the ear of her bosom friend twenty times a day to 
say that she has scorched her potatoes (no 
wonder!) or that her new shirt-waist doesn’t fit 
or that she thinks it’s going to rain. I acknowl- 
edge the impropriety of overhearing these con- 
fidences, but I have to—we all have to—in order 
to seize the wire when at last it is momentarily 
free. It is amusing to hear us clicking our re- 
ceivers and sighing audibly all up and down the 
line. This difficulty being what it is, one can 
understand that new subscribers are not desired in 
our part of the valley. 

The reason is low and selfish, however, and, to 
do us justice, it is not the reason which ranks first 
with Christopher and me when we assure our 
neighbors we'd rather have them use our telephone 
than install their own. Our great argument may 
be selfish too (I suppose most arguments are), but 
at least it is not self-centered; it consists in the 
grateful knowledge that through their use of our 
telephone our neighbors enlarge and deepen our 


Mountain Verities II5 


life, permitting us to share experience which other- 
wise we should never have had. Country life does 
this anyway. In the city, existence is specialized 
and groups of friends are apt to be of one temper 
and tradition; but in the country everything that 
happens, happens more or less to everyone and all 
temperaments associate. We had begun to realize 
this before we installed our telephone, and as soon 
as the latter step was taken we understood that the 
telephone room was henceforth the type and sym- 
bol of what we liked best about our new life. It 
belonged not so much to us as to the neighborhood, 
and for that reason it had not been willing to sub- 
serve the uses of our private household. For that 
reason also it had seven doors (mystic number, by 
the way!) through which our neighbors might 
enter and through which we of the household 
might scatter when we found ourselves de trop. 
Vermonters are traditionally proud and inde- 
pendent; they do not like to be extensively “‘be- 
holden.” Therefore it follows that our neighbors 
use our telephone mostly for inexorable reasons, 
and when we hear the side gate swing open and 
quick footsteps come up the walk, our first thought 
is: ‘Something has happened.” Then, with a 
strangely alert balance of mind, one of us hastens 
to answer the knock at the door, ready to respond 


116 Mountain Verities 


to any one of a number of tones in which the 
familiar question may be put: ‘Please, may I use 
the telephone?” Generally, I am sorry to say, it is 
into the shadow instead of the light that the bal- 
ance swings; for the joyful crises of life need no 
remedies and as a rule bring their own implements 
with them. The doctor, the telegraph operator 
and, alas! the undertaker are the people most often 
summoned by our neighbors over our telephone. 
Sometimes the initial appeal inaugurates a long, 
heart-rending series of similar applications, so that 
for days we are harrowed by suspense and bur- 
dened by responsibility. One of us must be always 
within earshot of the telephone bell and ready to 
hasten up the road with whatever message may 
arrive. How I ran, how I flew, how I waved my 
hand and shouted when “Your son better” came! 
But, alas! how soberly Christopher and I looked 
into each other’s faces the next morning and how 
cravenly glad we were that our neighbor had 
started for what she supposed to be her boy’s con- 
valescent bedside, and we should not have to break 
the fatal news to her. 

Most of the people who use our telephone 
naturally prefer to carry on their own conversa- 
tions, but a few of them have never learned to feel 
at ease in the manipulation of mouthpiece and re« 


Mountain Verities Buy 


ceiver, and they sometimes put us on our mettle by 
asking us to deliver all sorts and kinds of messages. 
“Oh, say! I don’t know how to do it. It drives all 
the words right out of my head and makes me feel 
awful queer. You do it forme. You just tell the 
doctor | ain’t quite satisfied, and I’m going to call 
someone else. Not exactly in those words, you 
know, but so’s not to hurt his feelings.” Or: “Say, 
Pve got a chance to trade horses with a man across 
the valley, and I wish you'd speak to him for me. 
Tell him my horse is as sound as a nut. I don’t 
know just how to put it and, anyway, he’d believe 
you sooner than me.’ On these occasions Christo- 
pher and I vie with each other in discovering 
errands to take us immediately and imperatively to 
remote parts of the house, but whichever one of us 
succeeds in “‘passing the buck”’ comes creeping back 
presently to admire the other’s conversational 
antics. Christopher guilelessly conducting a horse 
trade is a treat for gods and men. 

Not often, however, are our services as auxiliary 
mouthpieces desired, and not always is it expedient 
even that we share experience. Now and then it 
happens that a youthful neighbor, male or female, 
hesitatingly knocks at the door and asks so shyly, 
with such heightened color and evasive eyes, to use 
the telephone that I know my duty at once and 


118 Mountain Verities 


make haste to withdraw behind some one of the 
seven doors, closing it conspicuously behind me. I 
hate to do this. My appetite for romance is as 
keen as anyone’s, and it doesn’t seem fair that most 
of the vicarious life which the telephone brings me 
should be in the minor key. Christopher says that 
I have my full share of feminine curiosity too. But 
I am helpless to take advantage of my oppor- 
tunities for eaves-dropping; the telephone room 
will not let me, it keeps me firmly in my place. 
Generally that place is the kitchen, and I am some- 
times put to it to know what to do about an im- 
pending meal. Shall I let it dry up in the oven 
while Christopher waits hungrily in his correspond- 
ing imprisonment behind the dining-room door? 
Or shall I defiantly brave the telephone room’s dis- 
pleasure and scurry across it with my dinner 
dishes? Now and then I have risked the latter 
offence—‘‘after all, am I or am I not the mistress 
of this house?’’—but I have always been sorry. 
The floor of the telephone room has burned my 
feet. “Mistress of the rest of the house perhaps,” 
it has sternly informed me, “but not of me. I 
should think you would know that by this time. I 
belong to the person who is using the telephone.” 
Abashed, [I have taken refuge with Christopher 
and the rest of the dinner has dried or burned. 


Mountain Verities 119 


The result of all this is that I am coming to 
look on the telephone room with a kind of awe. 
We cannot be said to hold it in trust for the neigh- 
borhood, since we do not hold it, it concedes noth- 
ing to our title-deed. But we are permitted to 
house it and enable it to fulfil its destiny. It is an 
august little place, compact of tragedy and comedy 
and all the deep significance of human life. Its 
walls are written with an invisible script wherein 
drama lurks. 


XIII 


HAVE implied, if I have not actually stated, 

that vegetarianism, as a natural corollary to 

our new rule of simplicity, was being more and 
more consistently practiced by us. But perhaps 
consistently is not the word, for there was nothing 
rigid about our conformity. When meat came 
our way we ate it and liked it. It came seldom, 
however, and it was during our long successions of 
meatless days that we realized how little we missed 
the viand. 

‘ve always wondered if I didn’t want to be a 
vegetarian anyway,” I confessed to Christopher 
one day over a particularly delicious and satisfying 
egg and cheese soufflé which we were eating for 
dinner. 

Christopher grinned as a tribute to my con- 
servatism. 

‘And that’s as far as it ever went?” 

‘As far as it ever went. Oh! I’m ashamed 
when I realize how many nebulous ideas I’ve kept 
in the back of my mind all these years, too lazy or 


120 


Mountain Verities I2I 


timid to let them take shape and come forward 
where I could look at them. The whole idea of 
simplicity has just been waiting its chance; and 
vegetarianism—yes, the innocence and beauty of it 
have always appealed to me.” 

Well,” answered Christopher, “I guess we’re a 
lazy and timid lot in the world anyway. We accept 
standards as we find them and we put off challenge 
and change as long as possible. Moreover, per- 
haps, we don’t quite trust ourselves to really want 
to be different from other people. That’s only 
decent and modest in us. Who are we to prefer a 
manner of life which other people dislike? We're 
suspicious of fads too. Our self-respect restrains 
us from committing ourselves to that which after 
all we may not want to go on with. So we needn’t 
be altogether ashamed of ourselves.”’ 

“Only humbly grateful,” I added, “‘that circum- 
stance has enabled us to try out some of our ideas 
as matters of course and so has woven them for 
us into the warp and woof of everyday life. Vege- 
tarianism can’t be a fad when you practice it with- 
out realizing that you are doing so.” 

Christopher nodded. 

“We've been lucky,” he acquiesced. “And now 
that we do realize, now that we’re fully awake and 
aware, we must see to it that we stay so.” 


122 Mountain Verities 


“Christopher,” I replied feelingly—and by no 
means for the first time in my life—“you’re an 
amazingly satisfactory companion.” 

And yet, after all this, in spite of a truth which 
every intelligent reader will understand to be 
genuine, Christopher himself betrayed me into a 
situation which teemed with apparent falsehood: 
Christopher, “mine own familiar friend in whom 
I trusted, which did eat of my bread.” ‘The 
episode was one of those in which the irony of life 
delights. 

It happened this way—at least, it began, for the 
story has two parts: 

Issuing from an afternoon tea in the village one 
day, I found myself in company with two summer 
cottagers, unmarried women of a sedate and 
thoughtful demeanor, people whom I did not know 
very well but whom I liked and respected and in 
whose eyes I wished to appear estimable. Our way 
lay together for half a mile, and we naturally 
settled down to conversation. Now, as I have ex- 
plained in a previous chapter, real conversation for 
me that summer meant culinary discussion. My 
kitchen was my head of Charles the First. There- 
fore, I had not taken ten steps along the country 
road before I began: 

‘Somebody told me that you are doing your own 


Mountain Verities 123 


housework this summer. ‘That interests me, for 
I’m doing mine too. Do you like it? I do, but I 
find that it takes a great deal of time.” 

Even as I spoke, I was at a loss to account for 
the tone in which I made the concluding statement 
—anxious, almost aggrieved, as if, forsooth, I 
thought I had some ground for complaint! One’s 
own perversity plays tricks like that on one some- 
times. Perhaps it seemed to me that a touch of 
respectful inferiority on my part might prove in- 
gratiating. Whatever my motive, I was uncandid 
and richly deserved punishment. 

My companion’s response was cordial and quite 
as benevolent as I might have expected. 

“Oh, yes! we like it, and it by no means takes all 
our time. We've learned to manage. But then,” 
breaking off with a glance of condolence, “of 
course we have the advantage of you in the fact 
that we’re only two women. Everything must be 
harder with you and take more time.” 

I was nettled. ‘That was ridiculous in me, since 
I had clearly invited a measure of sympathy. But 
it was all a part of my prompt punishment. 

“Why?” I inquired coldly, feeling my mood 
veer to the defensive. 

Again my companion glanced at me, and this 
time there was a shade of perplexity mingled with 


124 Mountain Verities 


the compassion which every happily unmarried 
woman feels for the happily married. 

“Well,” she explained modestly, ‘of course a 
man makes a great difference in a house. He must 
have more to eat, he must live on a bigger scale 
altogether. We live very simply. For instance, 
we have meat only once a day, and all our meals 
are informal. We do the housework together and 
neither of us is fussy. Why, one day it even hap- 
pened that the meat peddler didn’t stop at all, 
and Ke 

But I could not stand this. It was too much. 
Outrage capped outrage when I was first pitied for 
having Christopher in the house and was then re- 
minded of the ease and beauty of simplicity. 
Christopher! I! Kindly explain to a Trappist 
monk that silence is golden; advise Mary Garden 
to cultivate a-musical ear! 

‘See here!” I broke in. ‘Excuse me, but you 
don’t know what you're talking about. Meat! 
fussy! a man! Why, it’s precisely Christopher 
who has taught me not to be fussy, and simplicity 
is the very thing we both like best of all. I couldn’t 
do my own work without Christopher. He’s full of 
ingenious suggestions and can turn his hand to any- 
thing. He doesn’t care what he has to eat, only 
he’d really rather not have meat. ‘Meat once a 





Mountain Verities 125 


day!’ Why, if we have it once a week we think 
we're living high. I didn’t even know there was a 
meat peddler in the village now, for he’s never 
learned the way to our house.”’ 

There was a silence. I hope the tone in which 
I had delivered myself of my repudiation had not 
been offensive, but I had certainly spoken flatly and 
there seemed nothing more to be said. My two 
companions glanced at each other, signalling a 
covert exchange of critical thoughts. I knew that 
they did not believe me, that they pitied me more 
than ever; and when our ways diverged, I left 
them, feeling unhappily that a promising conversa- 
tion had been most unfortunately spoiled and that 
I had somehow, obscurely, been defeated on my 
own ground. 

Three or four days later (and this 1s the second 
part of the story), Christopher and I were invited 
to a picnic in the village. We were to bring our 
own supper with us and contribute it to the com- 
mon supply of food. I made johnnycake and 
stuffed eggs and tried a new recipe for ginger- 
bread which turned out very well. 

We were rather late in arriving, for Christo- 
pher had, unexpectedly to both of us, been away 
from home all day and had returned only just in 
time to get a bath and change. 


126 Mountain Verities 


“Did you have any dinner?’ I called after him 
as he dashed upstairs. 

“Nope,” he called back. 

‘Well, see here,’”’—I followed to the bathroom 
door—“you must be frightfully hungry. Don’t 
you want a glass of milk? If I’d only known you 
were going like this, I’d have put you up a lunch.” 

‘‘Never mind,” he replied from the midst of his 
splashings, “‘there isn’t time now, and [ll get 
supper enough over there. Be ready to start in 
five minutes.”’ 

A dinnerless day leaves a vacuum in a big man 
like Christopher, and I was as glad for him as he 
was for himself to find that supper was already 
being served when we reached the picnic ground. 
I carried my contribution to the base of supplies, 
and Christopher dropped down in the first vacant 
place he saw—as it happened, beside one of the 
women with whom I had walked away from the 
tea a few days before. 

‘Can I help?” I inquired of the mistress of 
ceremonies. 

‘Why, yes, if you will,” she replied. ‘You 
might pass this plate of sandwiches.” 

Here we find succor for Christopher. I has- 
tened with it to that part of the group where he 
was seated, carrying on a brisk conversation with 


Mountain Verities 17 


everyone in his neighborhood and now and then 
ruefully regarding an inadequate dab of cream 
cheese which had been deposited on his plate. He 
never cares much for cream cheese anyway, and 
under the circumstances ! When I stopped 
before him he looked up and an expression came 
into his eyes which, I vow, I had never seen there 
before. (‘‘No, I presume not!” his present com- 
panion might have remarked.) It was eager, 
glowing, ecstatic; it was the gaze of a lost mariner 
at a familiar light. 

“Meat sandwiches!” he said, extending not one 
of his hands but both. ‘‘Oh, meat sandwiches! I 
tell you, that’s man’s food; that’s something like. 
Me for meat sandwiches!”’ 

Of course there is absolutely nothing to be done 
about a contretemps like that. The intelligent 
(and I hope properly sympathetic) reader does 
not need to be told that Christopher’s stress had 
nothing to do with the quality but everything with 
the quantity of the food he found before his 
famished eyes, and that he was contrasting it with 
the dab of cream cheese. A plateful of baked 
beans would have done just as well. But no 
amount of such explanation would have had any 
effect on his companions. They knew what they 
thought, and it was very definite and damaging. 





128 Mountain Verities 


‘The poor man! That wife of his gives him noth- 
ing to eat and then pretends that he doesn’t like 
food. Not like meat, indeed! His pleasure over 
those sandwiches was pitiful. Couldn’t we invite 
him to dinner once in a while and give him a 
square meal?” ‘The fact that they did not say this, 
that they said nothing at all and even refrained 
from laughing at me crushed me completely. It 
showed how seriously they took the affair. My ex- 
posure was so shameful that I must not be con- 
fronted with it. 

On the way home, between laughter and tears, I 
told Christopher what he had done, and he laughed 
loud and long—with no tears. 

‘It’s very strange how easily one betrays one’s 
self,” he reflected by and by on a subsiding chuckle. 
“One does not mean to, does not in the least want 
to, is desolated to do so in fact. Some imp 
possesses one.” 

“Yes,” I admitted. “I began it by talking the 
other day as if I found housework exacting. Did 
you ever!” 

“Well,” said Christopher, ‘then I guess you'll 
have to forgive me. We'll forgive ourselves. But 
perhaps it would be just as well not to make pre- 
tensions to simplicity in the future.” 

“Pretensions!’? I murmured. ‘Yes, I see. I 
did need taking down, didn’t I?” 


XIV 


more beautiful autumn followed it, we 

found ourselves facing an experience which 
excited us. We had neither of us ever spent a 
winter in the country, and the prospect of doing so 
filled us with as lively a sense of adventure as a 
trip to the other side of the moon. 

There were warnings and preparations enough. 
The October glory was swept from the trees, and 
the blazing hills became ashen gray, stripped and 
austere. he grass crouched and shrivelled. The 
birds disappeared. The sun followed them into 
the south and confined itself to an ever-diminishing 
circuit across the sky. Our neighbors busied them- 
selves in banking their houses with leaves, and the 
village store set up a counter of the strangest gar- 
ments I had ever seen. Such portentous garments! 
When they first appeared I stood spell-bound be- 
fore them. Then I plucked Christopher by the 
sleeve. “Look!” I said under my breath. 

The day was chilly and the village idlers had 


129 


\" the beautiful summer passed and the still 


130 Mountain Verities 


been driven in from the front steps to the neighbor- 
hood of the stove. Hence my timidity. I was pre. 
cisely in the position of a country-bred person be- 
fore a Fifth Avenue show-case and I felt con- 
spicuous and at a disadvantage. But my curiosity 
was too strong for the defensive indifference which 
instinct suggested. When the storekeeper bore 
down upon me I gratified him and my audience by 
breaking forth into questions which caused them 
all to lean and listen and smile behind their hands. 
‘What is that for? Do you wear it on your head 
or your feet? And what in the world is the nature 
of that?’ ‘The storekeeper was very polite—much 
more graciously so than a Fifth Avenue clerk 
would have been to a farmer’s wife—but he was 
amused and condescending, as why should he not 
have been? He showed me great shapeless boots 
and heavy felt stockings designed to be worn to- 
gether in layers of thickness and warmth. He 
showed me cumbersome fleece-lined coats and ear- 
eclipsing caps and solid mittens and gloves. As he 
demonstrated I had many a vivid glimpse of snow- 
heaped woods and many a shivering hint of mid- 
winter temperature. A few weeks later, Christo- 
pher went back and bought a sample of everything 
on that counter. 

I have always maintained that places have souls 


Mountain Verities 131 


and I am sure that the peculiarly sensitive soul of 
our valley was pleased by our casting in of our 
lot with her. As soon as she realized that we were 
indeed going to stay through the winter she re- 
warded us by turning and smiling on us in a series 
of the most magical days we had ever known. 
Summer in December, in Vermont! It was 
miraculous. I remember particularly one after- 
noon when I waited for Christopher alone in the 
woods. He had—to be perfectly frank, he had 
gone up on the mountainside to appropriate some 
of the fruits of an orchard which we seemed to 
appreciate more than its rightful owner. The 
woods were utterly still. ‘The tall bare trees stood 
in motionless gray ranks about me, and through 
and beyond them I could look off to the hills across 
the valley. The sun had gone down at three 
o’clock, and the creeping shadow of the western 
hills wrapped the feet of the opposite range, but 
the soaring peaks deepened in glowing color as the 
gloom advanced. Seen through the mist of the 
bare gray trees, they were like shining angels be- 
hind the uplifted swords or trumpets of the 
heavenly host. Even when the sunlight had left 
them they shone; and, as the dusk invaded my 
wood, all the air, within and without, became ob- 
scurely glimmering, dark yet pulsing with glory. 


132 Mountain Verities 


When the moon appeared above the tall delicate 
tree-tops and began to distill her peculiar witchery 
through the gathering vibrating shadows, and an 
owl added his deep-toned lament to the awful 
silence, I was almost annihilated with awe. Chris- 
topher’s timely return saved me from who knows 
what immortal spell! 

The combination of orchard robbing and mys- 
tical ecstasy was violent even for a Yankee humor, 
but it was characteristic of the early winter. 
Through the dreamy days went pulsing a note of 
admonition which was unheeded by no one from 
the smallest squirrel up to the biggest man. It was 
pleasant to feel the same impulse thrill through 
our furry brethren and ourselves; and we learned 
to note, as it were with one eye, that a certain tree 
made a clean-cut pattern against the sky, and with 
the other that, among the withered leaves under- 
neath it, lay plenty of butternuts. A burlap bag 
became our constant companion on our walks. 

Apple and butternuts, fire wood, a keg of cider, 
a bin of coal, reams of paper and scores of paint 
tubes—all these promising things we laid in with 
eager content. Our old house, accustomed to de- 
sertion, was supremely gratified. 

Beautiful and reassuring as was the December 
respite, we were not sorry when it ended and real 


Mountain Verities 133 


winter began. Our mood was set forward, we 
were in tune with our adventure and wanted to be- 
gin upon it. We desired that concentration of 
interest which is winter’s boon. 

We got it presently! On a night which seemed 
no colder than many of its predecessors the kitchen 
sink insidiously froze, and for the better part of 
the next day Christopher lived a life of intense con- 
centration. ‘Then the wind rose and it became ap- 
parent that there were several weak places in the 
armor of our home. Another day was devoted to 
the application of yards of weather-stripping. For 
a time it looked as if the indoor demands of winter 
were going to prove as preoccupying as those of 
outdoors in summer. But that was only because 
our inexperience had kept us from making ade- 
quate preparations; and by the time of the first big 
snow-storm, we had met and mastered most of our 
difficulties. 

It was a Christmas snow. Nothing could have 
been more timely or more beautiful. We were out 
in it for hours, for we had decided to send our 
Christmas greeting to our friends in boxes of 
ground pine this year, and we had to make haste 
to rescue our spicy green lengths of treasure from 
a white obliteration. Clad in the village store 
garments which, a few weeks before, had seemed 


134 Mountain Verities 


so strange but which now seemed quite obviously 
suitable, we moved in a white whirling wonderland, 
a realm of dancing mystery. 

The mood of the valley was pensive and gentle 
during this first prolonged fall of the snow, there 
was no menace in it. But when the sky cleared, a 
subtle change came creeping through the crystal 
air. It did not announce or define itself in any 
definite way; that was why it was so disquieting. 
Christopher and I glanced at each other. Then we 
made mutual haste to light the lamp, draw the cur- 
tains, stir the open fire, gather the books and the 
pipe and the bowl of apples. We shut ourselves 
into the heart of our house and the dear abode 
clasped us close and brooded protectingly over us. 
Before going to bed we opened the door and 
looked out to consult the thermometer. But we 
hurried back, gasping; the keen air cut the breath 
from our lips. As for the thermometer, it 
registered ten degrees below zero and during the 
night it went down another fifteen degrees! 

The next morning we woke with a sense of ex- 
citement. How should we find our familiar world 
affected by the very unfamiliar temperature? It 
was not easy to look out on it, for our windows 
were thickly furred with frost; but, scratching 
peep-holes here and there, we caught dazzling 


Mountain Verities 135 


glimpses of a gleaming orchard and lawn. Later, 
when the sun was fully up, we put on all the clothes 
we could find and went outdoors. Not that we 
really needed so many wraps. The cold was so in- 
tense that it burned; there was white fire in the 
frost and it tingled in our veins. The mood of the 
day was triumphant. Against a brilliant blue sky 
the hills lifted their crests in peaks and domes of 
chiselled silver. Across the floor of the valley the 
fields of snow stretched unbroken and gleaming; 
deep blue shadows lay by the fence posts and the 
trunks of trees. ‘The brooks were fettered. 
Through caverns and grottoes of snow-laden ice 
they made a difficult tortuous way, tinkling musi- 
cally. The pines and spruces were heaped with 
snow. In the glittering whiteness, their branches 
gave comforting touches of color and warmth. 
What a day! It was so exhilarating that we 
wanted incessantly to shout and sing and leap and 
run. When the sun went down and the shadow 
began to creep up the eastern mountain range, driv- 
ing the deepening glory before it, we were breath- 
less with admiration. From gold to orange, from 
orange to rose, from rose to glowing ruby, the 
color grew and flamed. The hills were trans- 
figured. The sight of them was like the sound of 
some great symphony, vibrating with trumpets. 


136 Mountain Verities 


At last the tip of Green Peak was left like a linger- 
ing note, like a single perfect jewel glowing above 
the twilight. But even after the dusk had claimed 
all the still winter world, light and color came beat- 
ing back out of the clear, pulsing west, and the 
white hills shone obscurely. Then later the stars! 
Hung in the fathomless sky, they blazed in such 
multitudes that the imagination reeled beneath 
them. 

It was days like this that made Christopher and 
me realize how little we had missed by not going to 
the city. ‘The knowledge surprised us somewhat. 
We had made sure that, however the country might 
recompense us, we should still feel the lack of 
music and picture exhibitions and plays and all 
that ministers so variously to the life of the spirit in 
a big city. But we had not counted on the power 
of one great interest to fill all channels if it gets an 
undisputed chance. Green Peak and West Moun- 
tain were perfectly capable of being opera, drama, 
gallery, everything that we loved and needed. 
Further, it seemed to us, as we progressed with the 
winter’s experience and studied and analyzed it, 
that, here in the country, we were getting the essen- 
tial substance of life, the material which the city 
takes up and re-fashions into forms of art. What 
are Wagner’s operas but interpretations of rivers 


e 


Mountain Verities 137 


and forests, storm clouds, heights, and all the 
cosmic forces that animate the universe? What 
are dramas but idealized rearrangements of the 
human history that acts itself out freely and 
frankly in scattered farm-houses and up and down 
village streets? ‘To be sure, there is a meaning in 
art which crude nature does not always make mani- 
fest; the rearrangement has a significance which 
the original haphazard arrangement too often 
lacks. But every observer is capable of being, to 
some extent, his own artist, and Christopher and 
I were at fault if we could not hear symphonies 
in the winter wind and in the profound silence of 
the woods, and if we could not ring the curtain up 
and down upon the events that took place about 
us. 

I have already related how many more social de- 
mands were made upon us (especially Christo- 
pher) in the country than in the city. They in- 
creased during the winter when the farming popu- 
lation had time to disport itself in “sociables,”’ 
Science Club méttings, Grange suppers, gatherings 
of one sort and another. People from cities think 
of small towns as utterly dead in the winter 
(“What do you ever find to do with your- 
selves?”’), but as a matter of fact they are hum- 
ming with activity. Christopher and I played our 


138 Mountain Verities 


part and learned to render services which, a few 
months before, had seemed “‘not in our line.” 

‘Tt’s life, isn’t it?” commented Christopher 
thoughtfully sometimes, ‘‘real, downright, many- 
sided life. So far we've known and loved it from 
three or four angles, but now we're dealing with 
the whole thing. It’s great.” And, doffing his 
absurd village store carpet slippers, he would don 
a pair of huge boots and dash off to lend a hand 
in the harvesting of ice. 

The valley is not so inconsistent as to demand 
versatility of its inhabitants without practicing the 
interesting virtue in its own ever-changing moods. 
This was no news to us. Had we not watched the 
fluctuations of many summers? But we had sup- 
posed that the winter would prove the most stable 
and uniform of the seasons, perhaps even a little 
monotonous, and we were surprised to find that, 
on the contrary, it had a much wider range of 
variety than summer, spring or autumn. ‘There is 
no other difference so violent as that between 
brown fields and snowy fields, between bare hills 
and hills glittering with frost, and this sort of con- 
trast was often wrought in the course of a few 
hours. 

On the whole, I think that we liked the look of 
the valley better without the snow than with it. 


Mountain Verities 139 


That also surprised us. We were not prepared for 
the wealth of color that lingered among the 
stripped bushes and trees. The swamps were 
glorious. That is a bright word but I repeat it: 
glorious. Sometimes when the light was just right, 
they revealed such depths within depths of ochre 
and vermilion mingled with amethyst, such warm 
russets and glowing reds that Christopher’s palette 
became a veritable Joseph’s coat before them. 

The woods, too, disclosed new beauties. With 
the falling of the leaves, they had given up much 
of their secret mystery, but they still retained the 
trick of exquisite surprises. Unforgettable was the 
delicate, ghost-like look of some beech saplings 
seen from a little distance within the heart of a 
maple grove. The pale withered leaves clung to 
the gray branches like spirit foliage, and groups of 
them drifted and poised among the silent upright 
trunks of the larger trees. No summer foliage 
ever had their haunting grace. We visited them 
again and again, watcliing their gradual refinement 
through the inexorable action of the frost and rain. 
By the end of February they had changed from 
pale gold to an almost transparent white. 

Busy as we were during this winter of our great 
content, we found a wide difference between the 
character of the city’s preoccupation and that of 


140 Mountain Verities 


the country. The former is feverish, hurried, de- 
manding speed and intensity and leaving behind 
it a burden of fatigue. The latter moves within 
margins and makes no especial haste. This boon 
of the margin came to seem to us one of our most 
priceless possessions, that which, henceforth and 
forever, we could not forgo. Also we found that 
we had escaped the irksome necessity of spending 
precious time and effort on undertakings that are 
purely conventional or that are means to ends. 

But it was in the interests of a broader and 
richer intelligence that we found ourselves most 
glad of the experience. No earth child should 
count his human life complete unless he has shared 
all the experience of his earth mother, going the 
round of the seasens with her, learning how she 
adapts herself to vicissitude and what beauty and 
gladness she brings out of it. Storm and sunshine, 
growth and rest, the progress of the seasons, the 
changing of the skies: these are the primitive, en- 
during interests of our race. 

It has been said that God walks in gardens. 
Well, certainly, his great white throne seems very 
definitely set up on earth, in mid-winter, in 
Vermont. 


XV 


UNDAMENTALLY, I suppose, human 
nature is pretty uniform and folks are folks 
everywhere. But there is a distinction be- 

tween city people and country folk which was borne 
in upon Christopher and me during our first winter 
in Vermont. 

In January we received a visit from some New 
York relatives. By that time we had become so 
inured to the conditions of rural winter life that 
they had ceased to seem strange to us. One by one 
we had, almost unconsciously, discarded our old 
garments, replacing them with village store prod- 
ucts admirably suited to our daily battles with frost 
and snow. We were clad as we should be, as any 
one should be in Vermont, as all our neighbors 
were; and therefore we thought no more about our 
attire than a woodchuck thinks about his fur. 

Our relatives dazzled us when they alighted 
from what, in our valley, we are pleased to call 
“The Flier,” but we had expected that. Fresh 
from the city, how should they look if not citified? 


141 


142 Mountain Verities 


Derby hats, overcoats, veils, gloves, plumes, high 
heels, pointed toes—those were natural emanations 
from ‘“The Flier”; and though they awed us a 
little, they constrained us not at all. To be sure 
we were glad when their owners said they thought 
they’d like to go up to their rooms and “‘change 
into something easier.” We agreed with them 
that the place for creased trousers and patent 
leather shoes was in the guest-room closet. But 
when, after an unconscionably long absence (one 
advantage of real country clothes is that they can 
be quickly donned), our guests came down again, 
we narrowly saved ourselves from a most un- 
mannerly outburst of commentary. Did they call 
those country clothes? Own Fifth Avenue brother 
to the creased trousers was this knickerbocker 
affair, golf-stockinged and tan-booted below, 
morocco-belted above and surmounted by trim out- 
ing shirt and coat. I saw Christopher glance at 
his “wool pants” (that was the only name the 
village store had for them) and his heavy sweater 
and moccasins, and we both giggled—then hastily 
told a funny story to save our courtesy. Relatives 
though our visitors were, we did not feel at ease 
with them for some time—not until the tan shoes 
had lost their lustre in the coal cellar and the 
knickerbockers had acquired an unconventional bag 


Mountain Verities 143 


by dint of exploring the recesses of the frozen 
kitchen sink. 

A few weeks after this private family episode, 
the whole village was startled by the arrival at the 
village inn of two of our summer residents whose 
faces we had never seen before save in July and 
August. They did not come unannounced. They 
had written to the innkeeper a curiously excited 
letter, breathing adventure in every line, explaining 
that, never having seen the country in mid-winter, 
they thought they’d like to come up for a week or 
two of winter sports. 

‘Winter sports!’ The innkeeper had scratched 
his head, sharing this letter with his interested 
friends. ‘‘Well, seems to me I’ve heard the term. 
But I’m afraid this ain’t precisely the weather for 
"em, is it?” 

And we had looked dubiously at the bare ground 
showing through the thin covering of snow which 
was all that a recent thaw had left us. 

However inadequate our preparations for them 
may have been, the winter sporters’ preparations 
for us were elaborate. They dismounted at the 
station muffled to their ears in furs, fur-capped and 
fur-mittened. One would have thought they were 
on their way to the North Pole. They must have 
been somewhat disconcerted to be met by a wheeled 


144 Mountain Verities 


surrey, but they bravely surmounted the disillusion. 
‘“Too cold to snow, I suppose. Well, that’s fine.” 
The surrey driver declared afterwards that, 
though their fur-enveloped foreheads were drip- 
ping, they shivered happily all the way up the 
valley, jouncing through the rutty, soggy roads. 

Arrived at the inn, they, like our guests of a 
few weeks before, betook themselves at once to 
their rooms accompanied by many trunks. Thence 
they emerged in an hour or so clad in outfits which 
must have taxed all the manufacturer’s ingenuity 
and which gave our village a shock from which it 
has not yet recovered. Deep snow trafic had evi- 
dently been the idea which had governed the selec- 
tion of their wardrobes and to that end they had 
furled and reefed and abbreviated as much as 
possible. ‘Their legs were encased in high, fleece- 
lined, waterproof boots, not at all like the village 
store arctics familiar to us, but very stylish affairs, 
trim and elegant. He wore knickerbockers, and 
she wore a skirt—but could one call it a skirt? It 
came nowhere near her knees and flared coquet- 
tishly, showing her nether garments of brown 
corduroy. To those of us who were not country 
born and bred, a ballet dancer suggestion was in- 
evitable. Parading down our demure village street 
over the thin layer of snow, the effect was sa 


Mountain Verities 145 


startling that all the front window curtains of the 
houses became profoundly agitated. 

For sheer charity’s and decency’s sake, we all 
fell to and prayed for a blizzard that night. But 
our prayers remained unanswered. Perhaps 
heaven thought we ought to be shocked out of a 
conservatism which had prevented most of our 
women from dressing fashionably ever since short 
skirts came in; perhaps it wanted to let us see what 
the human spirit can do by way of refusing dis- 
illusion. The latter revelation was magnificent. 
These two city people had come among us for the 
sake of enjoying winter sports under arctic con- 
ditions; and during ten days of mild, open weather, 
they continued steadfastly to carry out their pro- 
gramme. Every morning the attentive village saw 
them start out on a day of adventure and explora- 
tion, prepared for every possible emergency. 
Their costumes were as above described, varied 
by woolen scarfs of different bright hues. At his 
belt the man carried a small hatchet and knife and 
a pistol—in case night overtook them afar in the 
snowy waste and they had to make camp and live 
on the land. Skis were on their feet, and far be- 
hind them, at the end of a long rope, trailed an 
object which looked uncommonly like Freddy 
Brewster’s flexible flier (neglected by its owner 


146 Mountain Werities 


now for obvious reasons) but gravely referred to 
by them as a sledge. This bore their duffle, con- 
sisting of blankets, frying-pan, coffee-pot and lunch 
basket. The problem of finding snow enough to 
receive the imprint of their skis must have been a 
serious one with them, though of course they never 
admitted it. But fortunately our meadows are 
wide, if not always deep, and by taking a slightly 
different direction each day, the explorers managed 
to continue to tread virgin snows. By the end of 
the week they had covered the valley everywhere 
with long streaks of brown winter grass. Their 
general daily direction was always the same: tow- 
ard a mountain facing north-east, where the snow 
accumulates most deeply and lingers longest. 
There, I daresay, they succeeded in finding a drift 
or two. It is probable that, to this day, they talk 
about their adventures among the deep snows of 
mid-winter in the Green Mountains. Wet shall cer- 
tainly never stop talking about those clothes of 
theirs. 

So far I have written as if the difference between 
city people and country folk were altogether one 
of self-conscious attire. But of course the distinc- 
tion lies deeper than that; or at least, it is the self- 
consciousness that gives it significance rather than 
the attire. Perhaps that is just it: city people 


Mountain Verities 147 


dress up for the country, treat it as if it were some- 
thing strange, pose for it a little. Whereas we 
who live in the country know that it is the real 
thing, it is “it,” and city life is the existence to be 
self-conscious about. 

Is it fair to say that, on the whole, city people 
play at country life rather than live it? Of course 
many of them have established country homes. 
But, for the most part, they either maintain 
retinues of servants (according to no legitimate 
country tradition) or they do not pretend to live 
normally—they “camp out” for the season. 

‘For the season”: that is another of their sig- 
nificant phrases. What season? Christopher and 
I have come to feel that, of the four seasons of the 
year, one is about as important as another and 
that only by living through them all can we fully 
share the life of our beloved valley. ‘The 
season’! Arrogant term! April and November 
laugh across it at each other. 

Yes, I am afraid that city people are sometimes 
a little arrogant. They do not in the least mean 
to be so, and perhaps the condition is so subtle that 
it is part of the nature of things and therefore not 
worth criticizing. It is a matter of point of view. 
City people regard the country as created to be ad- 
mired and exploited by them—one of their lux- 


148 Mountain Verities 


uries. Country folk regard it as the natural en- 
vironment of everyday, busy human life, common 
to all. They take it as a matter of course and are 
quite simply and honestly themselves in it. Mod- 
estly, too. ‘Our valley,” “our mountains,” ‘our 
brooks” are summer cottage phrases. And it is 
the cottager who goes to work to set his imprint 
on the landscape, terracing the rocky pastures, 
breaking the skyline with his bungalows, spoiling 
the brooks with his dams and artificial lakes. 
After all, what parvenus they all are, these city 
people! Long before their Fifth Avenue shops 
were erected and their boots and ballet skirts de- 
vised, we and our arctics and our wool pants were 
dwelling quietly in the snow (or thaw), taking the 
world as we found it and adapting ourselves to it. 
It has always seemed to us on the whole pretty 
good (though there have been days when we have 
thought less well of it), but never anything to be 
held at arm’s length and admired. It was meant 
for a man to lose himself in, and, losing, find him- 
self, immensely and unconsciously augmented; a 
place in which to work rather than play. It was 
it, we were we: that was all there was to it, until 
these city people came along and called our atten- 
tion to the fact that we were living in an art 
museum instead of in the universe. Then 





Mountain Verities 149 


But it is time I ended this chapter. I have just 
remembered that Christopher was born in Harris- 
burg and I in Philadelphia and that, until a few 
years ago, we both lived in New York. 


XVI 


S a matter of fact, we are sometimes afraid 
that the city taint will cling to us always, 
that we shall never succeed in becoming 

thoroughly steeped in rusticity. And that fear de- 
presses and humbles us. 

I shall never forget how shocked we were by a 
chance conversation we overheard between Sammy 
Pierce, passing our house on his way to school, and 
a stranger strolling up the road. Our windows 
were open and we heard every word. 

‘Hello, sonny! You belong in these parts?” 

LEDS: 

‘Well, you know all the folks then. Who lives 
in this house ?”’ 

Sammy mentioned our name. 

‘City people or country folk?” 

CATV. 

It was too cruel! We turned and gazed at each 
other, surprise and chagrin and perplexity reflected 
from face to face. Tacitly we understood and ad- 
mitted that the verdict came from a reliably repre- 


150 


Mountain Verities I51 


sentative source. But what had we done to de- 
serve it? Wherein had we failed? 

The revelation was made at a particularly trying 
time, for we were just back from a flying trip to 
New York which had made us realize that we had 
completely lost our urbanity. That had been good 
news to us, we had delighted in it. Putting up at 
a small hotel and registering from Vermont, we 
had found ourselves showered with handbills ad- 
vertising spectacular shows highly recommended 
gan tne Harmer’s Delight,’ ‘The Stranger’s 
Recreation”; and during our whole sojourn we had 
never ventured into the street without being cau- 
tioned and directed by the deeply interested and 
solicitous elevator boy. “I expect you find this 
quite a lively town. Yes’m. Well, you want to 
be careful crossing Broadway. And you don’t 
want to miss seeing the Hippodrome.” 

On Sunday morning I[ had drifted into a small 
church and had immediately been accosted by a 
benevolent, white-haired parishioner. ‘Good 
morning. You're a stranger. Well, we're very 
glad to have you come and worship with us. You 
are a resident of ‘i 

“Vermont,” I supplied. 

“Ah? That’s very nice. Let me introduce you 
to one or two of our people before the service be- 





152 Mountain Verities 


gins. Mrs. Patterson, come over here and meet 
this lady from the country.” 

Yes, Vermont was ‘‘the country’’—all of it, even 
its towns—frankly, blessedly country—and we 
were its residents. With shouts of joy we returned 
to it, only to learn from the lips of Sammy Pierce 
that, through some subtle failure or lack, we were 
not qualified to rank as true country folk. The city 
disowned us, but the country would not recognize 
us. The blow was severe. 

What was the matter? We discussed the sub- 
ject thoroughly at our next meal. 

‘It’s certainly not our clothes,” I began, survey- 
ing Christopher’s flannel shirt and sweater and 
glancing down at my gingham dress. “TI think I 
haven't told you that yesterday, when we were do- 
ing errands in Manchester and I had lost track of 
your whereabouts, I looked out of the window of 
the drug store and said to myself. “There goes a 
typical old hayseed,’ and, lo and behold, it was 
you!” 

Christopher laughed delightedly. 

“That makes me feel better,” he said. ‘“‘No, 
it can’t be our clothes. Nor our food.” He helped 
himself to some baked beans and a piece of cheese. 
‘Perhaps it’s my profession. Landscape painters 
aren’t really indigenous.” 


Mountain Verities 153 


“But I suspect,’ I demurred, “that our neigh- 
bors consider your painting a harmless pastime and 
your potatoes and apples and corn your real pro- 
fession.”” 

“Well, then it’s your flower garden. It’s en- 
tirely too big and indulges in too many fancy ex- 
periments for the garden of a typical housewife. 
You ought to have a few petunias and nasturtiums 
in the front yard and a lot of potted geraniums in 
the windows.” 

“Perhaps,” I admitted. ‘But everyone can see 
that my poor garden grows smaller and more ne- 
glected every year. No, I don’t believe it’s any- 
thing so obvious as clothes or food or occupation; 
it’s some trick, some attitude, some flavor, of which 
we're unconscious. Slight things are always most 
potent, you know. Perhaps it’s just because, when 
we go to see people, we’re more apt to knock at 
the front door than at the back. And, now that I 
come to think of it, I realize that people hardly 
ever knock at our kitchen door. Oh, that’s damag- 
ing!” 

We were both of us really troubled about the 
situation, we soberly took it to heart; and, for the 
next few weeks, we watched and studied and criti- 
cized ourselves and one another. Never did any 
proselytes of a new religion more wistfully long to 


154 Mountain Verities 


acquire perfect ease of genuflexion and liturgical 
response than we longed to seem to the country 
manner born. “Christopher, you shouldn't get 
your hair cut guite so often.”’ ‘For heaven’s sake, 
let’s stop using finger bowls.” I locked the front 
door and made all my callers come around to the 
rear of the house where, as often as not, I enter- 
tained them in the kitchen. 

But, even while thus homelily entertaining, there 
was one trick which I could not master, one pro- 
found habit which I never could adopt. And I 
suppose the failure will always stand between me 
and the goal of true rusticity which is my 
ambition. | 

It is simple enough, the habit. It consists merely 
in turning the head and occasionally the shoulders 
to look out of the window when somebody 
passes the house. All native Vermonters do the 
thing to perfection and so instinctively that it seems 
as inevitable as the bending of the knees to sit 
down or the drawing in of the breath to speak. 
Cosily chatting beside the fire, intent on the subject 
in hand, they have only to hear a sound in the road 
to turn away, still chatting perhaps, and look and 
watch until they have made sure who is going by 
and have registered all available details. [hen 
they turn back and go on with the conversation. 


Mountain Verities 155 


Now why can I not do this? I try and try, prac- 
ticing gaily with Christopher and patiently by my- 
self, but always to no avail. I feel self-conscious 
and awkward. It seems to me discourteous to turn 
away from the person with whom I am talking and 
gaze at somebody else. Yet I know it is not; it is 
as humanly natural as all other country customs, 
and the failure to adopt it brands me as lacking in 
some essential rustic quality. For I am afraid the 
bottom truth is that I really do not much care who 
is passing the house, and that is distinctly an urban 
indifference. 

I remember well how mortified I was one day 
when a neighbor called me up on the telephone and 
asked if a load of furniture had passed our house 
on its way up the hill road. 

“Why, I—I’m afraid—I—I don’t know,” I 
stammered. 

‘That’s funny,” she answered after a slight 
pause to adjust herself to the strangeness of my 
way of putting the thing. “I made sure they'd 
be there by this time.” 

“But I said I didn’t know,” I repeated 
miserably. 

“Well, I wonder—would it be too much trouble 
for you to call me up when they do come?” she 


156 Mountain Verities 
continued, still ignoring the incredible reality I was 
trying to convey to her. 

In the end I was forced to call up another neigh- 
bor and put the unhappy question; then, learning 
that, ‘Why, yes, they went by twenty minutes ago 
—you must have been down cellar,” I relayed the 
information and felt myself disgraced. 

It is no light matter to fail of one’s heart’s de- 
sire by one small, obstinate disability. 

Most of the country habits, however, seem 
second nature to us now, and most of the country 
points of view have become thoroughly our own. 

Take funerals. 

Time was when we avoided them and thought 
our neighbors morbid for dropping everything in 
order to attend them. It seemed to us almost in- 
decent to make such haste to intrude on a fellow 
townsman’s grief. But that was because we did 
not understand. Oh, no! we did not understand. 
We know now that the interest is anything but in- 
trusive or morbid, that it is a deeply human re- 
sponse to a noble summons, and that a country 
funeral is one of the grandest as well as one of the 
most poignantly touching experiences an attentive 
heart can have. 

_ We discovered this when, because Christopher 
had been asked to be one of the pall bearers, we 


Mountain Verities 157 


attended the funeral of a village resident. It does 
not matter now who he was. The universality 
rather than the particularity of the experience was 
what made it so impressive. 

The service was held in the church and at least 
an hour before the time appointed, vehicles began 
passing our house on their way thither. When we 
arrived we found the church fuller than it ever ts 
on a Sunday morning. ‘There was an air—how 
shall I define or describe it? . . . an air of expec- 
tancy, almost of exaltation about the people, as if 
they knew that something great awaited them. 
They sat motionless, but one could feel that their 
spirits were profoundly moved. When the door 
opened behind them and the six pall bearers, two 
by two, came up the aisle, they rose as a migrating 
flock of birds rises to begin its flight. 

Christopher had dressed up for the occasion, 
but, though I had accepted his doing so as a 
matter of course, I was rather sorry now. For 
some of his companions had come just as they 
were, in flannel shirts and heavy boots, and their 
appearance had an effect of rugged, homely sin- 
cerity which I found beautiful. From the hard- 
working, earth-dealing heart of their lives they 
had come to pay tribute to death, and their simple 


158° Mountain Verities 


directness made human dissolution seem as quietly 
natural as the falling of autumn leaves 

The casket, covered with flowers, was wheeled 
by a middle-aged man with a compassionate, 
fatherly face. From his professional-looking black 
gloves I knew he must answer to the term, so 
opprobrious in the city, of undertaker. But I like- 
wise reflected that I had never heard the term here 
in Vermont. ‘Will you please call up Mr. 
Nesbit?” had been the subdued formula with 
which a bereaved neighbor had asked to use our 
telephone. Looking upon him now, I understood 
that, like the doctor and the minister, he was one 
of the fathers of the Great Events, and my heart 
went out to him. How well he must know all the 
valley folk! ‘They were his charges. When he 
manipulated the casket into place on the rug before 
the pulpit, I was irresistibly reminded of the deal- 
ings of a parent with a child in a perambulator, and 
the comparison did not seem grotesque to me. 

Behind the casket the mourners trooped, inf- 
nitely more touching in their improvised, nonde- 
script black garments than people I had seen else- 
where who looked as if they had spent the last two 
days in the dressmaker’s hands. One woman wore 
a long black veil over a red hat; another had on a 
black blouse and a tan skirt. They were not weep- 


Mountain Verities 159 


ing; their faces looked awed and acquiescent. Only 
their shoulders drooped as if a new weight had 
come on them. 

The service was beautiful. Yet if I had known 
what kind it was to be, I should have wanted more 
than ever to stay away, for I thought I preferred 
such things to be strictly impersonal. There was 
music by a quartette—‘‘My faith looks up to 
Thee” and “Lead kindly light”; there was a prayer 
and a grave reading of the fifteenth chapter of 
First Corinthians; and there was what the valley 
people still call a “funeral sermon.” ‘The latter 
was delivered by a native of the valley, retired 
from active ministry but frequently called on to 
serve with his beautiful, sympathetic gift. He 
spoke that day in an allegory full of the significance 
of the passing seasons, of the strength of the 
mountains and the peace of the fields—spoke as 
Christ used to speak to his people in homely para- 
bles. As he leaned over the casket and talked, so 
quietly, so clearly, he seemed to be leading us all 
up to the great Gate and holding it open while one 
of us went through and the rest gazed after him. 

When the noble benediction had been pro- 
nounced—*Now may he who brought again from 
the dead our Lord Jesus Christ’—there was a 
pause and a silence and then Mr. Nesbit came for- 


160 Mountain Verities 


ward and, removing some of the flowers, lifted the 
lid of the casket and stood aside. 

Again, if I had known this was to happen, I 
should have shrunk and recoiled. But, not know- 
ing, I realized the response almost before the 
summons and was on my feet borne forward by the 
wave that swept the churchful of people. Not 
morbid, not distasteful was this universal move- 
ment, but an instinctive, inevitable tribute of life to 
death, an august ‘‘Hail and farewell!” Never in 
my experience had I felt such a passionate sense 
of oneness with any company of people as I felt 
with my neighbors as, side by side, one after an- 
other, we went up the aisle. I was they, they were 
I, and we were together the whole human race. 
There in our little church among the mountains the 
two great mysteries, life and death, stood face to 
face and lo, they also were not two but one. 

Out in the cemetery the sun was shining dreamily 
through an autumn mist. The hills stood round 
about, stripped of their leaves and austere but 
very gentle in their gray peace. The valley was 
silent. The harvests had been garnered and the 
birds were flown. The hazy blue sky bent low over 
us. What a time to be gathered away into the 
arms of the great Mother! What a time to creep 
back and rest, so as to be ready to begin over 


Mountain Verities 161 


again! Nobody wept. Country hearts share the 
patience and selflessness of the dumb creatures and 
the natural processes with which they associate. 
“Dust to dust, ashes to ashes’’—the solemn rite 
was ended, the commitment made, and, one by 
one, group by group, the people turned away. 

Christopher’s hand clasped mine as he came up 
beside me and for a long time neither of us spoke. 
Then, 

“Oh Christopher!” I murmured, “I am hence- 
forth and forever a very member incorporate of 
this community.” 


XVII 


T was not, however, as if we had entirely lost 
the city, for there was Rutland, only thirty-five 
miles away, and there was our trusty Ford. 

In big cities—New York or Chicago or Paris— 
we had both of us always hated the business of 
shopping. It was too huge, that was the trouble. 
There were too many shops, too many articles, too 
many possible answers to our modest needs. Also 
it was too impersonal. No touch of humanity 
seemed to lurk in the great establishments or in the 
bored attendants. We had accepted our dislike as 
part of the permanent order of things, and its dis- 
sipation was certainly the last miracle we had ex- 
pected of Vermont. 

Accordingly, it was from the point of view of 
the old settled repugnance that I began, one beauti- 
ful spring morning: 

“Christopher, I’m awfully sorry, but I’ve just 
got to have some new shoes before very long. 
What can I do about it? It’s too much of a risk 


162 


Mountain Verities 163 


to get them through a mail order catalogue 
and i 

To my surprise, Christopher broke in with any- 
thing but the resigned expression which [| had 
anticipated: 

“Well, ve got to have some too, and a hat and 
some shirts and—oh, lots of things. Suppose we 
run up to Rutland.” 

Rutland!” I was astonished at the thrill of ex- 
citement that pervaded me. Visions of city streets 
flashed before me, I glimpsed a policeman, a 
trolley car, a restaurant, shop windows. But why 
should I want to see these things? ‘They pertained 
to the city and I was wedded to the country. More- 
over, if I did want to see them, it was absurd to 
seek them in a town of twenty thousand inhabi- 
tants. Rutland! I caught my breath, flew to clear 
the table and wash the breakfast dishes, made all 
haste to don the best looking clothes I had. 

‘What's the matter with me?” I said a little 
later as we sped northward through the radiant 
spring world. ‘I’m as pleased as a child on his 
way to a circus, and it’s not just because I’m having 
a beautiful drive either. If you were to turn off 
on that side road, I daresay we'd find ourselves 
in even lovelier country than this, but I should be 
disappointed.” 





164 Mountain Verities 


Christopher laughed, glancing sidewise from 
the steering wheel. 

‘You want to see the city, and so do I,” he said. 

‘But I should hate to be on my way to New 
York.” 

“Of course. For people like us Rutland em- 
bodies the city idea much more satisfactorily than 
a huge, distracting area like New York. I dare- 
say we are going to find that Rutland supremely 
typifies urbanity to us.” 

It was true, he was right. As we mounted a hill 
and swung around a curve which brought our desti- 
nation into sight, we both cheered. There it was, 


The City, all cities, lying compactly among its hills, 


with its church steeples pricking the sky, and we, 
the country, were speeding toward it for a draught 
of the refreshment which it alone could give. 
When we felt the asphalt beneath our wheels we 
sat up straighter and I adjusted both our hats. 
(Christopher was of course intent on observing 
trafhc regulations.) “You do need some new 
clothes,” I murmured; ‘‘and we'd both better get 
our shoes blackened before we do anything else.” 
Two streets of shops, maybe three; a policeman 
standing beside a semaphore, seriously holding 
back a milk wagon and a Ford, while he en- 
couraged a load of potatoes and two other Fords 


Mountain Verities 165 


to proceed on their way; a trolley car; a whiff of 
soft coal smoke from the railroad yards; a peanut 
stand; a cinema; shop windows; a restaurant; two 
or three hotels: the city—oh, the city! We parked 
our own Ford and got out, elated and intent. 

It would take me too long to describe in detail 
the events and discoveries of the next four or five 
hours. They were a revelation to us of what the 
city and country can do when they work hand in 
hand. We separated because our errands naturally 
took us into different shops, but we continually en- 
countered each other unexpectedly in the street 
(that was part of the novel fun, a brand new ex- 
perience) and then we paused to compare notes. 
‘Never saw anything like it. Why, I’ve had every- 
thing charged.” ‘‘They certainly are friendly 
people. I’m having a lot of clothes sent home on 
approval.” 

As a matter of fact, though I had never seen her 
until that morning, I felt before noon that a cer- 
tain young woman in a coat and suit department 
was one of my oldest friends. Her treatment of 
me was something entirely new in my shopping ex- 
perience. here was no sense of hurry about her 
—that was the first reassuring element in our inter- 
course. Then she gave me her whole attention 
as if she really enjoyed helping me to provide my- 


166 Mountain Verities 


self with some new clothes. Yet she did not de- 
spise my old ones; not a single disparaging glance 
did she cast. Ours was a human transaction, that 
was the gist of the matter. We were two women 
conferring together upon a subject that we both 
found important and interesting. 

“Why don’t you let me send them all home?” 
she suggested. ‘Then you can be sure you're not 
making any mistake.”’ 

“But,” I objected, “I don’t live in Rutland, Ive 
never been here before, and of course I’ve no 
charge account.” 

“That doesn’t matter,’ she answered. “I’m 
sure the head of the department would have no ob- 
jection.” 

‘‘But—but—’”’ I stammered by and by when she 
suggested that I put on a certain coat and wear it 
out in the street to hunt up Christopher and get his 
criticism, ‘‘do you really think it’s safe to give your 
customers such privileges?” 

She laughed. 

‘‘We do more than that for our people. Why, 
the other day, your village doctor’s wife blew in 
here with her husband’s emergency kit in her hand. 
She’d caught the train in a hurry and grabbed the 
wrong bag. She had an appointment with the 
photographer and didn’t know what to do because 


Mountain Verities 167 


she’d left her best blouse behind. But we fixed her 
up. We loaned her one of our blouses.” 

I was immensely intrigued. 

‘Do you suppose the railroad let her charge her 
fare, 

“Maybe,” my new friend assented. ‘Or maybe 
she borrowed some money from someone in the 
train.” 

So that was the way things were done in Ver- 
mont! I felt that I hada great deal to talk over 
with Christopher when I met him for luncheon, 
and I was prompt in keeping my appointment at 
the restaurant. I found him waiting for me with 
a bright-eyed and amused and reflective face. Ap- 
parently he also was brimming with communi- 
cation. 

But first we must select our viands from a large 
menu card and that engrossed us for five minutes. 
“Gee! I’d forgotten there were so many different 
kinds of things to eat. Let’s have everything we 
don’t get at home.” The waitress stood at a 
distance, understandingly giving us time to take 
our bearings. How many bewildered rustics, emer- 
ging from dusty Fords, she had served in her day! 
As for us, not Sherry’s, not the Waldorf had ever 
given us such a sense of epicurean adventure as 
that Rutland restaurant. 


168 Mountain Verities 


In the afternoon I took Christopher to meet my 
new friend in the coat and suit department, and he 
took me to help him select a hat in the Men’s 
Haberdashery. Then we both went to the dentist's 
and there surprise crowned surprise in the dis- 
covery that in Rutland even the dentists are 
friendly. We gave so much thought to conversa- 
tion about this and that (Vermont politics, Ver- 
mont scenery and fishing, Vermont literature) that 
we hardly realized we were having cavities filled. 

It was a great day. Before we reclaimed our 
Ford from the side street where it had been 
patiently and safely awaiting us, we went to the. 
Five and Ten Cent Store, the market, the book-. 
shop, the bakery, all the establishments the like of 
which our village does not know. Christopher got 
his hair cut and I bought a new powder puff. I 
even surreptitiously slipped into the railroad sta- 
tion and watched a train pull out. 

Yes, it was a great day. I was too tired to be 
sorry when it was over and, our tonneau piled with 
packages, we slipped out into the quiet country 
where, after all, we belonged, but I fetched a sigh 
and glanced back. ‘‘The dentist says I’ve a tooth 
that will need attention in a few weeks,” I re- 
marked hopefully. 

‘Didn't I tell you?” cried Christopher. ‘‘Rut- 


Mountain Verities 169 


land gives us the cream of the city without such 
quarts of skim milk. It’s going to be any amount 
of fun to have it to go to once in a while.” 

“But we wouldn’t live there.” 

“Oh, no! The country’s the place to live in, the 
city’s the place to visit. The country’s the real 
thing and the more the city’s affected by it the 
better the city is.” 

‘Rutland is human.” 

‘New York is a monstrosity.” 

“Do you know, it’s soberly true that if I were 
going to Paris, I’d buy all my clothes for the 
journey in Rutland and expect to wear them till I 
got home again.” 

There was a long pause. The afternoon hills 
moved slowly about and above us as we sped in 
among them, the shadows were long. How lovely 
the world was, how dear and good our life in this 
corner of it! 

“Christopher,” I mused, “we're children, aren't 
we—middle-aged children? I suppose the zest 
we have found in this day’s experience would seem 
to most people incredibly puerile.”’ 

Christopher glanced at me. There was a 
volume of wise and humorous comment in his eyes. 

“According to a very intelligent Person,” he 


170 Mountain Verities 


said, “being little children is our only chance of 
attaining the kingdom of heaven.”’ 

‘Why won’t Vermont do?” 

‘For heaven, you mean? Well, there’s a tra- 
dition that there are no Vermonters in heaven, for 
when they get there they won’t stay.” 


XVIII 


T may have been noticed that Christopher and 

I like to share our experiences. But there are 

a few adventures that, if undertaken at all, 

ought to be undertaken alone; and, as the spring 

drew on, I one day announced my intention of 
‘‘going warbling, quite by myself.” 

Christopher looked at me quizzically. It is an 
unfortunate fact that I have no voice for singing. 
“‘Can’t make me mad!” he retaliated rudely. 

But I missed him when I was out in the fields, 
for it was an utterly heavenly day. The shadbush 
was coming into bloom and delicate young green 
was beginning to clothe the woods. Rapturous 
season! On such a day the soberest human spirit 
grows young as the newest-born lamb and gambols 
ecstatically. Oh, unfolding flowers! Oh, pushing 
grass! Oh, shouting, darting birds! Bless ye the 
Lord! 

Ideally one should need no excuse for wandering 
indefinitely through spring fields and woods. But 
human nature is not yet quite ideal and, discon- 


171 


172 Mountain Verities 


certingly, our careful virtues are sometimes found 
to be as mistaken as our faults. We consider it 
virtuous to be purposeful, to refrain from spending 
our time in pursuits that “get us nowhere.” But, 
since a certain amount of irresponsibility is neces- 
sary to us, especially in the spring, we have had re- 
course to subterfuge and, by inventing the thing 
called “nature study,” have silenced our scruples 
and got what we wanted. As if the sum of the 
world’s welfare could be increased by anyone’s 
identification of a scrap of green and yellow 
feathers as a magnolia rather than a myrtle 
warbler! Particularly when, in order to make the 
distinction, one has to leave one’s husband’s bread 
unbaked. 

There were various spots among which I might 
choose the scene of my warbler activities, but that 
which on the whole promised most was a patch of 
tangled bushes and young trees on the outskirts of 
a wood. Birds of all sorts love this place. It gives 
them both freedom and privacy, it supplies them 
with food, and it enables them to tease nature 
students to the top of their bent. ‘That last is a 
very important point in warbler psychology. 

In the old days when Christopher and I were 
‘summer cottagers,” I used to carry a bird book 
with me on my walks; but I always felt uncom- 


Mountain Verities 173 


monly foolish, sitting down under the trees, turning 
the pages feverishly, murmuring, ‘“T'wo white wing 
bars—no, that’s wrong—a yellow throat—well, 
maybe it is yellow, though it looks white to me. 
A black line through the eye. Oh! the creature’s 
laughing at me.” Moreover, the book was in my 
way when I charged in among the bushes in yet 
another effort to trace that black line, and I drop- 
ped it and lost it and had the mischief of a time 
finding it again. So, on my last expedition, I took 
only a small, shabby pair of opera glasses which I 
could slip into my pocket. Details as to wing-bars 
and eye lines I decided to defer until I should get 
home, with the comforting realization that thus I 
might forget or confuse them a little and so be en- 
abled to conclude, ‘Yes, that must have been a 
Philadelphia vireo,” when probably it wasn’t at 
all. 

It will be perceived that warbling, as conducted 
by me, is an entirely shameless proceeding. 

It is not wholly unmoral, however. On the 
contrary, it seems to suggest and illustrate a com- 
plete philosophy of life. Patience, perseverance, 
good temper: those required attributes are 
obvious enough. And self-control. Only he who 
can rule body and spirit will ever get maddening 
tufts of feathers focussed long enough to see them 


174 Mountain Verities 


at all. But the philosophy goes deeper than that. 
It finds its base in the great mysterious principle 
that the way to secure the best things in life is not 
to rush after them furiously but to wait on them 
with an open mind, and that he who seeks earnestly 
for some explicit thing is quite as likely as not 
to find something else. 

On this particular day which I am remembering, 
I started out on my quest with an open mind. I 
entered the patch of bushes and gave myself over 
to destiny. The sweet spring influences sur- 
rounded me, the hills stood grandly beneath the 
radiant sky, the sun brooded warmly. How good 
life was, how infinitely peaceful! I felt my whole 
being relax and expand in the oneness which is the 
soul of creation. Then, presto! a flash through 
the young leaves of a neighboring tree, a challeng- 
ing call, a glimpse of feathers in rapid motion, and 
my struggle was on. 

Not that there ought to have been any struggle 
about it. The only rational thing to be done was 
to sit quite still. But that was not easy. Having 
advertised his presence, the warbler betook him- 
self to a half-fledged tree in the middle distance, 
not near enough to be observed in detail. ‘There 
he perched on an exposed limb which, if he had 
been nearer, would have made him an excellent 


Mountain Verities 175 


mark for the opera glasses, and there, in spite of 
all his ractal tradition and personal habit, he imi- 
tated my philosophy of sitting still. This was 
amazingly clever in him. He seemed to know per- 
fectly that if he stayed there long enough—and not 
so very long either—I would be tempted to rise 
and make my way cautiously to him, persuaded 
that for once my policy of quiescence was a mis- 
take. Whereupon, if I did this, of course, with a 
dart and a flash, he would be gone, either farther 
into the thicket or, more likely, back to the spot I 
had just left. 

No, I would not gratify him. I would stick out 
his wiles and delays, waiting till his spurious 
patience had exhausted itself. He could not fool 
me! I settled down to the business of sitting him 
out. : 

But presently my quiescence began, in its turn, 
to torment me. My gaze remained focussed on 
my chosen bird, but out of the tail of my eye I 
saw—what? Something stirred in the bush close 
beside me, a nameless presence emerged and went 
softly exploring the leaf buds not three yards away. 
Should I look at him? ‘The chance was so good. 
And perhaps he might turn out to be as interesting 
as the creature perched over yonder. ‘After all, 
it is part of my philosophy to take the blessings 


176 Mountain Werities 


which the woods provide. So I unriveted my gaze 
from the tree and glanced quickly at the bush. A 
summer yellow bird! As familiar to me as a robin 
or a song sparrow! Back went my disappointed 
glance to the tree, only to find that the unknown 
warbler had as completely disappeared as last 
winter’s snow. 

This was maddening. But of course it did not 
do to yield to exasperation. Rather, it was more 
than ever imperative to sit still. For most birds 
are curious, and, for all we know, they may have 
their own observations to make: “Forehead some- 
what lined, shoulders stooping a little, ink-mark on 
the third finger—that must be a scholar.” Or: 
‘Streaks of paint irregularly disposed, absent- 
minded expression, negligent attire—probably an 
artist.” Or: “Glossy black, with a narrow white 
wing-bar near the tip and a white band around the 
neck—a clergyman.” I flattered myself that it 
would take a pretty experienced warbler to classify 
me, my country life has involved me in so many 
avocations, and I sat and awaited the return of 
my bird. Hecame in the end and brought his mate 
with him. ‘Then, for as long a session as I had the 
heart to keep Christopher dinnerless, the two of 
them appeared and vanished before me, beside me, 
above me, around me, resuming full warbler activ- 


Mountain Verities 177, 


ity, so that I could seldom scrutinize them, but 
giving me innumerable glimpses from which to 
build up an impression. Meantime, they dis- 
cussed me in a fashion which I daresay I might 
have found embarrassing if I had understood it. 

My intentions toward Christopher and _ his 
dinner were good and sincere, but, on the way 
home to fulfill them, I was betrayed into a dis- 
astrous departure from the path. A bird I was 
perfectly sure I had never seen before flew over my 
head, almost brushing my hair with its wings, and 
perched on a young tree standing in a tangle of 
bushes. He was so near that, by moving only a 
few yards, I could focus him; and, really, I was 
confident that he was a rare specimen. So I went 
after him. 

What a chase he led me! Through tangled 
bushes and briers, over rotten logs, over the 
tussocks of a swamp, in and out among the trees. 
Never once did I see him clearly enough to get 
anything but the vaguest impression of his mark- 
ings, and when I reached home exhausted, I could 
only sigh to the hungry but uncomplaining Chris- 
topher, ‘Well, it must have been some rare mi- 
grant. At least I’m glad I caught a glimpse of 
him.” 

The climax of this experience came the next 


178 Mountain Verities 


morning when, still tired and vexed, I was putter- 
ing in the garden. What did I hear? What did I 
see perching tamely on one of our fence-posts? 
Not the tricksy fugitive of the day before? But 
this familiar visitor was a common “summer 
resident,” a bird I had known all my life. The © 
humiliation of the discovery was extreme. 

On the whole, I am glad that the warbling 
season comes only once a year. 


XIX 


HEN we had lived in the country a year, 
we realized that we were indebted to it 
not only for spiritual boons beyond our 

highest hopes, but also for material succor that, 
in the reign of high prices, was invaluable. The 
old established firm of Sun, Rain, Earth and Com- 
pany had fed us bountifully. 

It was Christopher who first took the hint of this 
generous intention and communicated it to me. [ 
was standing before a great basket of early im- 
ported spinach in the village store, hesitating dan- 
gerously between my natural inclination and the re- 
pressing influence of the probable price, when 
Christopher murmured in my ear, “There are lots 
of young dandelions behind the studio.” The 
effect was magical. I turned and left the store with 
haste and, speeding homeward, armed myself with 
a basket and a kitchen knife and was soon digging 
happily. 

The spring sunshine was warm on my back, blue- 
birds and song sparrows caroled around me, the 


179 


180 Mountain Verities 


tender young grass was succulent and succulent 
were the young dandelions with which my basket 
presently overflowed. On the step of the side 
porch I picked them over, eliminating various un- 
desirable insects and twigs; in the kitchen sink I 
washed them in many waters; and when I had © 
boiled them and chopped them, salted and 
peppered and buttered them, we had a dinner 
which made us laugh spinach to scorn. No market 
product ever had such a zestful flavor, full of the 
tang and impulse of the young year. And all for 
nothing! Then and there I resolved that I would 
not miss a single gracious opportunity which 
Nature might afford me during the year. - | 
But, as profit is not Nature and Company’s 
method, so neither is advertising, and its bene- 
ficiaries have to look alive. Cowslips came after 
dandelions, and they appeared so silently in the 
swamp that we almost let them grow beyond the 
proper stage of edibility. Not quite, however. In 
rubber boots, splashing oozily, Christopher and I 
waded in among the chorusing frogs and fluting 
red-winged blackbirds, and gathered great hand- 
fuls of the rather unpromising leathery leaves. 
They were good, though, delicious; and once more 
we had a dinner fit for the king of the Beatitudes. 
It was almost June when the milkweed ap- 


Mountain Verities 181 


peared, and the wildness and tang of the earlier 
season had given place to gentler influences. I 
realized this when I noticed how much more slowly 
and thoughtfully I gathered the new provender, 
wandering down the road with my basket, stopping 
to smell the wild roses and greet the daisies and 
buttercups. [he deepening meadows lay in the 
sun, with bobolinks exulting over them, and the 
shining hills were at last completely clothed in their 
summer robes of green. A great content stole 
through my being, a restful confidence that had 
something primitive about it, as if, in my new de- 
pendence on Nature, I were harking back to an 
old Golden Age when simple people quite literally 
took no thought for the morrow and knew that 
somehow or other they would be fed. It was a 
sensation precious beyond any telling. I wish I 
could set all the troubled people in the world to 
gathering milkweed. But let them cull only the 
little topmost leaves and let them allow an hour 
for cooking if they would know its full excellence. 

“But, after all, really, you know, we aren't 
rabbits,” said Christopher thoughtfully one day. 
It was a timely remonstrance. For, just about 
then, our neighbors began going up the hill with 
pails in their hands and I knew that the wild straw- 
berry season was on. 


182 Mountain Verities 


How shall one describe the joys of wild straw- 
berrying? Everything about it is beautiful: the 
situation—a hillside meadow, deep (but not too 
deep) with June grass, full of birds and flowers, 
looking out over the valley to the blue, shadow- 
swept hills; the loveliness of the largess lurking | 
among the cool grass stems, glowing and graceful 
and so fragrant that the whole meadow seems a 
bowl of incense. The fragrance is almost more 
delicious than the taste. But the taste leaves noth- 
ing to be desired, and he who stoops and gathers 
and eats feels a sacramental significance in the 
flavor which lies upon his tongue. 

I have nothing whatever to say against the en- — 
thusiasm which prompts my neighbors to take milk 
pails instead of quart cups when they go wild 
strawberrying, and keeps them picking and hulling 
and cooking day after day. ‘Their winter cellars 
are the richer for marvelous preserves. But I 
think they can hardly know the pure, serene joy of 
one who picks only a quart at a time. For picking 
and hulling on a large scale is downright hard work, 
and hard work does tire the body and dull the edge 
of the spirit. I like to pick slowly and I really prefer 
a meadow where the fruit does not hang too thick. 
Profusion is bewildering and exhausting, keeping 
the attention strained; but a discreet dispersal is 


Mountain Verities 183 


satisfactory. One gathers and rises and wanders, 
stops to look out over the valley and follow the 
flight of a goldfinch; one even sits down now and 
then and gives himself over to the mood of the 
day. As the ancient Israelites gathered only 
enough manna for their immediate need, so do I 
like to deal sparingly with wild strawberries. They 
are too exquisite to be profaned. 

Raspberries are not so interesting as straw- 
berries; but, by the time they take up the tale of 
the year’s generosity, one’s spirit has matured with 
the season and settled into a sobriety which craves 
repose rather than excitement. In the heavy July 
heat the open meadows are often oppressive (ask 
the hay makers!) and the business of hunting and 
stooping and rising, hunting and stooping again, 
might easily become irksome. Better is it to stand 
erect on the edge of an upland pasture, with the 
cool breath of the neighboring woods on one’s 
cheek and the ineffable song of the hermit thrush 
in one’s ears, and pick from a bush laden so lavishly 
with ruby fruit that in a few minutes one has all he 
needs and can set his pail aside and go wandering 
into the woods, seeking fruits of the spirit. Tem- 
peramentally I have always preferred the ebb of 
the year to its flow, and as the advent of the rasp- 
berry seems to mark the turn of the tide, I have a 


184 Mountain Verities 


peculiar regard for it. ‘Though not so poetic as 
the strawberry, it is perhaps more philosophical; 
it begins to understand the secrets of quietness and 
humility. 

Then, in August, the blackberry; and sometimes 
I am inclined to think this is the best of all. But 
probably that is just because I love its month so 
well. Ah, the serene beauty of the hills, wrapped 
in misty light, with slow, vague cloud-shadows drift- 
ing over them! ‘The woods are silent, the brooks 
are low and run quietly, the sky enfolds the earth, 
and dreams and visions lie lurking everywhere. 
Yet the blackberry is not a mystical fruit. On the 
contrary, there is something very practical and 
downright about its plump, glossy sides, shining 
with good fellowship. ‘That is all the better. It 
supplies just the right touch of obvious common 
sense which its transcendent environment needs by 
way of balance. 

Christopher was so busy all summer that he 
could seldom find time to accompany me on my 
berrying expeditions. ‘That is why this chapter 
has, so far, been written in the first person singular. 
But when late October saw all the apples gathered © 
and all the potatoes and squashes in the cellar and 
when the first sharp frosts had invited us, he threw 
a burlap bag over his shoulder and went nutting 


Mountain Verities 185 


with me. Then came the very best pleasure of 
the year. Over the frost-touched hills we ranged, 
not because we had to go so far but because we 
wanted to. The repose of the year had deepened 
and settled until it had become an established con- 
dition; the very last hint of restlessness had gone 
out of it. But the air was full of vigor and zest. 
The stripped mountains were soft gray against the 
blue sky, and only the oak leaves clung here and 
there to their branches. ‘The crickets phrased the 
great symphony of silence. We had little to say 
as we moved side by side, but we had so much to 
see and feel that we almost forgot our special 
errand. Not really, though, for this last boon at 
the hand of Nature was part of the significance of 
the whole blessed day. Butternuts to heap in our 
woodshed and crack on our hearthstone during the 
long winter evenings were a rich acquisition. The 
mood of the day was one which fostered garnering. 
Squirrels and chipmunks were everywhere busy, 
carrying booty off to their stores. Woodchucks 
drowsed thoughtfully at the mouths of their holes. 
Winter was coming and all animals who did not 
mean to go south must make their preparations. 
Christopher and I are animals, and we liked to 
feel our kinship with our furry brethren as, at last, 
turning toward home, we stopped under a butter- 


186 Mountain Verities 


nut tree and began to fill our bag. Rough, unpre- 
possessing largess was this, lacking all the grace 
and amenability of the earlier offerings but hiding 
within it a richer nutriment than any herb or berry. 

Thus we have come through a year of high 
prices and have almost continuously been fed for © 
nothing. Of course there have been some trifling 
expenses for flour and sugar and milk and eggs, 
but we have afforded them more uncomplainingly 
since we have been able to look on them as 
garniture. 


XX 


= HAT’S the matter?” asked Christopher. 
I looked up, startled. We were lin- 
gering over our supper one stormy eve- 
ning at the beginning of our second winter. The 
rain was drumming on the porch roof, the candle 
flames were quivering and shining in our four silver 
candle-sticks. We were very cosy. I had not in- 
tended to convey the impression that anything was 
the matter. In fact, I had been so lost in my medi- 
tations that I had not fully understood that they 
were troubling me. 

“Out with it!” Christopher summoned. 

I pushed back my plate and leaned my elbows on 
the table. (It is part of our general emancipation 
that we are not very rigid about table manners. ) 

“Well,” I replied, ‘I suppose it’s a good time 
to air the question. I’ve been thinking about it 
more or less frequently for several weeks. I won- 
der if you have too. Or do you present a duck’s 
back to the waters of family advice?” 

187 


188 Mountain Verities 


“Oh!” exclaimed Christopher, enlightened. 
“Tt’s that letter from Cousin Mary.” 

“Yes,” I admitted slowly, “that among other 
things. But there was also a talk I had with your 
mother, and there was a word dropped by Uncle 
James, and there was a postscript to a note from . 
someone else; and, altogether, it has seemed as if 
a general conspiracy of remonstrance had begun.” 

‘To the effect?’ Christopher prompted. 

‘To the effect that you and I are making a mis- 
take.”’ 

Christopher smoked for a moment in silence. 
Once, as I watched him, I saw him gather his 
shoulders precisely as if for a duck shake; but then 
he thought better of the impulse. By and by he 
met my eyes. 

“You're right,” he said: “it is a good time to 
air the question. We'll get after it. The point, I 
suppose, is that, in thus living ‘apart from the 
world,’ we'll ‘get out of touch with our age,’ ‘out 
of the stream of tendency,’ ‘into a back-water.’ 
Those are the phrases, aren’t they?” 

“Yes,” I smiled, ‘they are. You've at least 
taken note of the flood that has poured over your 
back. The question for us is: do they mean as 
much as they seem to? ‘They sound so very im- 
portant.” 


Mountain Verities 189 


“But while we’re about it,” said Christopher, 
gazing into the heart of the candle flame nearest 
him, ‘don’t you think we may as well be thorough- 
going? Let’s begin at the beginning and ask what 
we mean by ‘the world’ and by life itself.” 

I was immensely interested and planted my 
elbows more firmly between my two candle-sticks. 

‘Those are big questions,” I replied. “I won- 
der if we can answer them.” 

‘We ought to be able to, oughtn’t we?” stated 
Christopher matter-of-factly. ‘Otherwise, what 
business have we to be living at all?” 

“Well, you begin, Christopher. What does 
life mean to you?”’ 

He hesitated—not as if he were at a loss, but as 
if he were selecting his words. And his next re- 
mark was not an answer, but a further question: 

‘Did you have to learn the catechism when you 
were a child?” 

It served as an answer to me, however, and a 
light sprang into my mind. 

“Yes!” I cried, leaning forward. “ ‘The chief 
end of man is to glorify God and to enjoy him for- 
ever. Oh, Christopher! are you really brave 
enough to say that that’s what life means to you?” 

‘Tt does take some courage,” Christopher ad- 
mitted, “‘and very likely I shouldn't have the 


190 Mountain Verities 


strength of mind for it if the fact hadn’t been 
stated by such severe old moralists as the very key- 
note of their analysis of duty. I never get over my 
surprise at them. Wouldn’t you have thought 
they’d have begun by laying down some rule of 
good works and salvation? But, no: just worship 
and joy—the simplest, easiest, most spontaneous 
thing. Instead of ecclesiastics, they might have 
been artists in an irresponsible mood. I declare!” 

He suddenly laughed aloud in his renewed ap- 
preciation. 

‘Tt always calls up in my mind a picture,” he 
went on presently. ‘“‘I see a wide, billowing plain, 
with mountains about it and a great sky overhead 
—floods of sunshine, fleets of clouds, birds sing- 
ing, grass waving—and in the midst of it all a man, 
standing with his head thrown back and his hands 
turned outward, simply worshipping. I can’t tell 
you how it frees and rests and establishes me to 
contemplate that picture.” 

I contemplated it also in silence for a minute or 
two. 

‘After all,” I began presently, “after all 

‘Yes,’ echoed Christopher eagerly. “After 
all! That's what I say to myself.” 

‘After all,’ I continued slowly, “our human 
situation is simple. Here we are, created and set 


” 





Mountain Verities I9I 


to live out our days in a very beautiful and fertile 
world. There seems no reason why we should 
make any fuss. But, misery me! what a fuss we 
have managed to make!” 

‘“Haven’t we, just?’ Christopher assented. 
“And mostly about nothing and to no end.” 

‘We ought to stop.” 

‘We must stop.” 

“But how?” 

“Why,” Christopher smiled, ‘when the war was 
on—the war to end war—one of your pacifist 
slogans was: the way to stop fighting is to stop 
fighting. I suppose the way to stop making a fuss 
is to stop making a fuss. We've stopped, haven’t 
we?’ 

‘“‘Measurably, yes,” I replied. ‘But we could, 
it was easy for us, the way presented itself. Some 
other people are more involved, they don’t know 
how to get clear. Some of them don’t want to, 
either.” 

“Exactly!” Christopher replied. ‘“That’s the 
real trouble: they don’t want to. I can’t believe 
that any man is so tied up to confusion that he 
couldn’t free himself if he really wanted to. 

‘‘And yet,” he went on after a moment, divining 
the flaws I was about to pick in his argument and 
giving them his careful attention, “I can’t believe, 


192 Mountain Werities 


either, that any sane man really, in his heart of 
hearts, likes to make a fuss. He’d look happier 
about it if he did. City crowds have such worried 
eyes and such furrowed brows.” 

‘But sometimes country people have stupid 
eyes, I put in, “‘and that’s just as bad. Do most 
people anywhere look happy, Christopher?” 

‘Children do,” Christopher replied after an- 
other thoughtful pause. ‘‘It all comes back to the 
big advice: become as little children. ‘The spirit 
of our age is anything but direct and simple, and it 
makes us all unhappy. In city and country we're 
failing to make the most of the few important uni- 
versal things.”’ 

‘Such as ?” 

‘Oh, such as life itself, the mere mystery 
(though it’s not very mere) of seeing and hearing 
and feeling and loving and worshipping. Such as 
dawn and sunset, the march of the seasons, the 
growth of trees and flowers. Such as human rela- 
tionships. Such as God and death and immor- 
tality.” 

‘Instead of which é! 

‘Instead of which, we devote ourselves to the 
manufacture of cosmetics or fancy buttons or chew- 
ing gum, and we put in our spare time at the 
movies and grow so dyspeptic and fretful that we 





Mountain Verities 193 


have to get divorces; and then we complain that 
life is a tragedy.” 

“Poor people!” I commented soberly. 

‘Poor people!’ Christopher echoed. 

“But what’s to be done about it?” I sat up be- 
tween my candle-sticks and gazed at Christopher. 
‘How can the buttons and chewing gum be sup- 
pressed, and the dawn and sunset come into their 
own again?” 

‘They can’t at once.” Christopher sighed and 
leaned forward to snuff one of his candles. “We'll 

all have to be patient and wait a long time. 
Frankly, I haven’t the least idea what’s to be done 
about it. There are reformations and revolutions 
enough just at present, but they most of them seem 
to be violent and godless and so one can’t trust 
them. They’re all so cock-sure and uncritical too. 
Not one of them starts out with a confession of sin. 
The spirit of humility has vanished from the earth. 
And without humility how can we become little 
children? At least,’ he qualified, “the kind of 
children whom Christ took in His arms.” 

There was a silence. We were both very grave 
by this time, and I am afraid our eyes were no 
happier than those we had been discussing. 

“You don’t think it’s selfish in us,” I ventured, 
coming at last to the heart of the problem that had 


194 Mountain Verities 


been troubling me, “‘you don’t think it’s selfish in 
us to live off here so happily, just minding our 
own business and letting the world wag?” 

‘‘No,” Christopher answered roundly, “I don’t. 
So long as we do mind our business and so long as 
the world’s waggings fail to win our confidence. 
What else should we do?” | 

‘“Well,’—I was vague—‘go to the city and 
work on committees for civic improvement and 
join organizations for promoting the welfare of 
the world.” 

‘“Waggings!” Christopher commented. “I don’t 
for a minute doubt their good intentions, but I 
don’t trust their spirit. It’s too headstrong and 
blatant. “The servant of the Lord must not strive 
nor cry. I do wish the whole world would be 
quiet for awhile.” 

‘‘And starve?” I put in, thinking of Russia and 
Central Europe. 

‘By no means!” Christopher replied. “It’s pre- 
cisely because we're quiet here, you and I, living 
simply, that we have a margin to spare. That 
might be true of many people if they didn’t spend 
so much time and money running around and or- 
ganizing. A world given over to simplicity and 
sharing would surely be able to supply its own 
needs and repair its ravages.” 


Mountain Verities 195 


“You talk as if the world were a unit,” I 
remarked. 

“Well, it is, isn’t it?’ Christopher answered. 
‘‘Religiously, philosophically, even scientifically. 
We really are all one, we earth people, and we 
suffer and thrive together. That’s another reason 
for my belief that it isn’t selfish in you and me to 
live off here among the mountains. If we keep our 
hearts open, there’s no telling how much peace and 
gladness may flow through us to others. Some 
hurried wretch may be this minute a little less har- 
assed because you're sitting there between your 
candle flames.” 

“Oh, Christopher!” I cried, ‘that’s a delightful 
theory, but it’s dangerous. So a millionaire might 
argue about his fortune: ‘Never mind, some poor 
man feels the richer today, even though he may 
not know it, because I have all this gold.’ ”’ 

Christopher smiled, but he shook his head. 

“Gold isn’t spiritual, and it has to be shared 
physically. Peace and simplicity can be handed on 
by—well, I suppose it’s by prayer, by a sort of 
mental intention, direction—yes, I guess prayer’s 
the word. They’re common goods, no one in the 
world can monopolize them. They don’t dwell with 
you, they flow through you. At least, isn’t that 
the way you feel about them?” 


196 Mountain Verities 


I nodded eagerly, more and more entranced 
with this theory. 

‘‘So that, some day, when I’m up in the woods,” 
I took my turn at developing the theme, “‘all alone 
with the silence and the immensity, if I stop and 
shut my eyes and pray, leaving my heart open and 
all my pathways cleared, I may hope to relieve the 
pressure on some crowded heart in the city.” 

Christopher nodded too, and we looked into 
each other’s eyes. 

“Well!” I said presently. ‘That gives a new 
significance to country life. We're living here not 
primarily for our own pleasure, but that the 
common life of the world may through us have a 
measure of peace and simplicity which otherwise 
it would lack. We're stewards. Or, no, that’s not 
it: we're channels. What a stirring idea!” 

“Of course it all depends on us,” said Christo- 
pher, “whether or not we share. It’s that business 
of intention that does the trick. If we just over- 
flow vaguely our waters don’t get anywhere. But 
if we es 

‘‘Pray,” I broke in. ‘“That’s the whole thing, 
isn’t it, Christopher? I’ve been thinking about it 
a lot lately anyway. Now, thanks to you, I see 
how can I practice it. Whenever I get a letter 
from someone in the city complaining of the pres- 





Mountain Verities 197 


sure of life, I shall go up in the woods or the 
orchard and pray that that person may have my 
peace, my silence, my sweep of sky and strength of 
hills. What an interesting experiment! I believe 
it will work.” 

“Yes, I believe it will,’ mused Christopher. “I 
believe that spiritual influences (‘psychic’ is the 
word at present) are more potent than we under- 
stand. The vicariousness of experience is one of 
the Christian ideas we haven't yet developed.” 

“It’s one of the secrets of the monasteries.” 

“Yes, and how frequently misunderstood! 
People call monks and nuns selfish because they 
live apart, but I daresay the world is more indebted 
to their prayers than to any reformation. Monas- 
teries are just great spiritual dynamos. They 
charge the world.” 

‘Can we be dynamos, Christopher?” 

‘Well, maybe, tiny ones.”’ 

“We can help clear the way, to give God a 
chance.” 

“We can also paint pictures and write books,” I 
continued after another of our thoughtful pauses. 

ee. 

But here Christopher manifested his usual reluc- 
tance to think too highly of his handiwork or to 


198 Mountain Verities 


attach any moral value to it, and I understood and 
shared his feeling. 

“Tt’s along that line,” I went on, changing the 
subject without dropping it, ‘‘that our critics make 
another point. They say we need association with 
other workers and their work in order to develop 
our talents.”’ 

‘“T don’t agree with them,” said Christophers 
with the roundness of utterance which he had al- 
ready employed during this conversation. “The 
essence of good work is originality. If you haven't 
got something different to say, why say anything? 
And it’s only by clearing a space around you that 
you can strike out your own path.” 

I saw his point and I nodded slowly. 

‘The thing is,” I said, ‘‘to be sure that we stand 
as near to the heart of reality as we can get, then 
to write and paint as simply and directly as pos- 
sible. We can’t all find the same heart in the 
same way, but nobody can find it at all except in 
his own way.” 

There was yet another silence. The flames in 
our candle-sticks still burned steadily, but the wind 
was rising outside. 

“Well,” I said presently, ‘‘we’ve disposed of the 
only criticisms that really count. We've decided 
that our life here in the country needn't be selfish 


Mountain Verities 199 


and that our work needn’t suffer because of it. 
Now how do you feel about the so-called ‘limita- 
tions’? Do zu 

Christopher interrupted me. 

“TI love ’em!” he burst out. ‘Gee! but I love 
‘em! ‘They’re the best things we have. I only 
wish there were more of them. Why, they’re what 
make it possible for us to get a little below the 
surface of the things they limit.” 

“You don’t miss music?” 

He hesitated. I had touched a vital point. 

“Sunsets are music,” he answered at length, 
“and so are moon-rises. I mean, the appeal of 
music is to an emotional wonder and awe, a sense 
of divinity, and the beautiful phases of the day 
and night make the same appeal. A man has only 
so much of a response to make at a given time. If 
he makes it to one thing he can’t make it to 
another.” 

‘And the theater?” 

“Well, the progress of the seasons is a grand 
drama.” 

‘And human intercourse? 

“Ah!” He threw out an eloquent hand. 
“Never did I suspect what human intercourse 
might mean when we lived in the city. There I 
knew a good many people but they were mostly 





200 Mountain Verities 


of the same type, and we talked about the same 
things over and over. ‘They weren’t ever rawly 
human with me, either. They had trained nurses 
when they were sick and plumbers when anything 
went wrong with their drains. They gave me a 
pleasant but superficial and limited view of human 
nature. Now, here in the country, I’m thrown 
with every kind of person there is, and I go way 
below the surface with most of them. There was 
old Plynn.”’ His face sobered. ‘‘When would it 
ever have happened to me in the city to be called 
in at the last minute to help a neighbor over the 
Styx? With no trained nurse and no doctor and 
nothing but stark death. When in the city would 
I have found myself a deacon of the church and a 
farmer and a plumber and a chauffeur and a 
scullery maid” (he grinned at my protest) ‘“‘and a 
landscape painter, all at the same time? Golly! 
when I think of these things, I’m inclined to take 
back what I said about limitations. There aren’t 
any, and I don’t want them. I feel as if, since 
coming here to live, I’ve for the first time begun 
to understand what life and human nature mean.” 

‘‘There’s farming too,” I said after a minute, 
indicating another line of thought. 

“Indeed there is!’? answered Christopher fer- 
vently. ‘Sometimes I think it’s the most impor- 


Mountain Verities 201 


tant and most alarming subject of our day. What's 
going to happen to the world if the farms lie un- 
cultivated? Oh, if people really want to make 
sure of serving their fellows, why don’t they close 
their button and chewing gum factories and buy 
farms? A farmer—I take off my hat to a 
farmer.” 

‘So, after all,” I mused, folding my napkin, for 
the candles were burning low, ‘“‘it seems that 
country life is the real thing.”’ 

“Tt certainly does,’’ Christopher assented. 
‘And when our families talk to us about ‘the 
world,’ we’re justified in advising them to join us 
in it as soon as possible.’ 


THE END 




















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